What Jonathan the tortoise can teach us about fake news

Let's start with the good news - Jonathan the tortoise has NOT died.

There were a few hours when the world believed its oldest living tortoise had sadly passed away at the impressive - and estimated - age of 193. It followed a message posted on X by someone claiming to be Joe Hollins, a vet who had cared for Jonathan in the past.

When the real Joe Hollins stepped forward to reveal it had been a hoax, he also mentioned that whoever had been posing as him had asked for donations - so it may have been a scam.

Before the real Joe spoke up, news sites across the world ran the story of Jonathan's death - so what does this teach us about fake news that appears on social media and how we should approach it? BBC Bitesize Other Side of the Story has a few tips.

Check your sources about Jonathan the tortoise

Although the news about Jonathan appeared to come from a reputable source, in this case a vet who had looked after him, it turned out not to be true.

Here's some useful advice on how to check the facts of a story before sharing it. These include:

• Who is telling the story and where did it come from?
  Apart from the post about Jonathan on X, was anyone else talking about it? We now know that the reason for the post was a possible hoax, so in this case it was important to make sure there were at least two sources of information (such as an official statement from Jonathan's owners in St Helena, where he lives). This is a really good way to verify a story - like double-checking.

• What is the reason behind this story?
  Why did this particular account share news about Jonathan? What does the account user want? In this case, it could be money made through donations in Jonathan's name, but other fake news reports are created to make other people or groups look bad in the eyes of the reader. This is called disinformation.

Were there any images of Jonathan the tortoise?

When someone tries to push fake news, they often won't have a genuine image to use with their story. It's common to take a picture from another source and use it in the fake story.

There is a way of checking if these images are genuine and that is through a reverse image search. This will show you where a picture has been used before, where it came from originally, and if it has been edited in any way. This can help you to decide of a story is genuine or not.

Why did they pick on Jonathan the tortoise?

It's not good to make up news about any sort of death, but when it comes to animals, people can be even more sympathetic than usual. Perhaps the poster thought that making up a story about an animal as well-known as Jonathan the tortoise would encourage more people to send donations, although this can't be proven.

We do know that animal posts and videos are incredibly popular. On TikTok alone there are 72.1m videos with the #cat and 28.2m marked #cats

A study by the University of Leeds in 2020 showed that we love cat videos because they have an emotional appeal (lots of us think cats are adorable balls of fluff), we can relate to it (cats are a popular pet) and that makes them very shareable - there are more than 200m Instagram posts with the hashtag #catsofinstagram

#tortoisesofinstagram is at 519k posts - but perhaps Jonathan's current wave of popularity can change all that.

This article was published in April 2026

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