Spoiler: He’s not actually dead.
The hoax was spread on YouTube through comments, tweets using the #RIPDrake hashtag and photoshopped images of CNN's site, and editing of Drake's Wikipedia page. Someone also made a BuzzFeed post as a Community user claiming Drake had died, which spread around the web.
We don't know exactly how all these things happened, or exactly who did it it, but we can say with some certainty that...Drake is not dead.
Here's how it went down.
We can't be sure that 4chan is actually where the hoax started. Screenshots of 4chan planning "Operation Drake" were posted to Tumblr and Twitter. However, one of BuzzFeed's editors did see people on 4chan talking about it that day (that thread, like all 4chan threads, expired and is gone).
But it's unclear if the hoax started somewhere else and 4chan just jumped on the bandwagon to claim it as its own.
On BuzzFeed, anyone can create a post as a Community user. Our Community posts are moderated by a team of editors here — they choose the best posts to go on our Community page and sometimes even to our main homepage. These Community posts go into a moderation queue to await an editor's review. While that post sits in our moderation queue, the post is live on the site (although not linked to anywhere on our homepage) and has a big disclaimer that says the post has not been vetted by the editorial team.
In the case of the Drake hoax, that’s what happened — the post was live, and even though someone browsing BuzzFeed would never see it (even if they searched for it), you can see it if you had the direct link to it.
Once our Community team saw the post, we removed the false information and added in an editor’s note.
