“Didn’t Happen Of The Year Awards”: 30 Cringe And Embarrassing Lies Spotted On The Internet (New Pics)

To gain some insight on why people are prone to lying in the first place, we reached out to Martin Johnson, co-founder and head of production at Soundtelling and co-host of the podcast Secrets. First, we wanted to know what inspired Martin to create a podcast about lies. "Me and Mohamed el Abed became inspired to create the podcast Secrets after long conversations between me and Julie Shapiro who was then working at PRX," Martin told Bored Panda. "Conversations that mostly were labelled 'work' in the schedule, but really were about life. And secrets became one of the topics. That we all carry secrets inside of us. Small and little lies that we live with through our lives. There have been scientific studies showing that we can ask people to not think about for example 'pink ponies'. And the only thing that they can think about after that are, of course, pink ponies - but then what happens to us if we carry real secrets inside of us? How does it change us as human beings?" 

"Of course, studies show that we lie all the time," Martin continued. "Small little white lies to ourselves and others to make life more bearable. But then there is a gliding scale, you might not want to tell your partner that you have sexual fantasize about coworkers, as it might hurt your partner."

"But what we tried to understand and pinpoint were people whose lives had been intertwined in lies," Martin shared. "We found a nature photographer who was extremely well respected, but was caught photoshopping Lynx cats in his extremely beautiful pictures. We met a police officer who lived undercover as a drug addict, while having a family in his other life. And he could never talk about either life. Just to mention a few."

We also asked Martin what he thinks the most common reasons are for lying. "I have for the last 8 years been working as an investigative journalist, confronting and investigating people and authorities," Martin told Bored Panda. "And what always strikes me is that people don't really intend to lie. The lies becomes a consequence of events or information that they don't want to be disclosed to the world. And why not? They don't want everyone to know what might have happened, because then people might look at them in a negative way. One must not forget that we are animals, and one of our greatest driving forces are survival, and when we get pushed away by the greater flock - there is a great chance we wouldn’t survive (if we where still living in the savanna). Another thing that I often reflect over is that people take lies with them into death. If people really felt that they would be released if they exposed the secrets to the world - then imagine the amount of murder and crimes that would be confessed while people were dying, and that - frankly doesn’t happen often." 

"The lies that we can see online are, of course, another layer," Martin adds. "The nature photographer that I mentioned - he published his photos online and in magazines - and therefore people online started questioning them. And that's how he eventually was exposed. But also nowadays - people lie online to provoke, because they feel like they are exposing a greater 'truth', and therefore the lies are accepted."

We also asked Martin if he thinks lies are ever justified or at the very least harmless. "According to science, an American has thirteen secrets - five of them never shared with anyone. Those five secrets can have a big impact on your physical and mental health (You're unfaithful, you’ve been raped by a family member when young, etc.). But those other secrets could be of another kind - I like to think of them as 'good secrets'. As a father of four children, I would never expose secrets that would hurt anyone in my family. So yes, lies are sometimes justified, and harmless."

"One part of secrets that people don't think about that often, because we tend to imagine secrets as something very personal - but there are secrets that can be shared and nourished within a small group of people. I spent three years of my life investigating a cult in Sweden for HBO Max - Pray Obey Kill. And they truly believed that their leader was the bride of Christ. She was going to marry Jesus when he came back to earth. And that secret that they kept for decades created an environment of physical and sexual violence. Where they controlled each other with even more lies. Almost like sopranos. So shared secrets at a smaller scale can sometimes be even more poisonous."

If you'd like to hear more from Martin about fascinating secrets people have kept, be sure to check out the podcast Secrets right here.

The internet is a fascinating place. As much as we love a larger than life story (after all, truth is stranger than fiction), we also love to rip apart anyone who gets caught lying. We go so quickly from being obsessed with exciting stories and being enamored with the absurd to turning into an angry mob with pitchforks when we feel stupid for being gullible. That’s why the Didn’t Happen of the Year Awards account is so much fun. Rather than falling for these ridiculous tales or seeing them and having no one to laugh with aside from any friends we send the tweets to via DM, readers get to laugh alongside over 420k other followers. 

The page has become so popular that the creator, Harry Barnes, even has a book coming out later this year featuring some of the most ridiculous tales from the Twitter account. “Whether it’s Chris Eubank telling the world that aged 18, he should have won $100k on the American lottery but got diddled out of it by the grocery store guy only to use it as motivation to win a world title six years later, or Britney Spears claiming to have run the 100m in a little over five seconds, the DIDN’T HAPPEN OF THE YEAR AWARDS OFFICIAL BOOK is full of hyperbole, embellishment and embroidery from a whole host of online exaggerators,” the book’s description states. “The book is filled with exclusive content including the real story behind Tom Zanetti and his supposed helicopter ride which was featured in The Mirror, as well as how the DHOTYA got brought up in UK Parliament.”

Why are we so quick to ridicule people who share false stories online? We usually cannot prove that these situations didn’t happen, and it doesn’t really matter anyway. People exaggerate the truth all the time, whether it’s a stand-up comedian telling white lies to make their set funnier or a parent insisting to their child that if they don’t go to sleep right this minute, Santa Claus won’t be coming at all. Plus the internet is rampant with fake news anyway, is it really the responsibility of Twitter and Facebook users to keep our internet fib-free?

Maybe we do get upset when we feel the unspoken agreement to be honest has been violated. It is not surprising to see a big company or a politician spread false information, but regular people are supposed to be honest. We are the glue that holds sites like Twitter and Facebook together, so we cannot start turning on each other by insisting that our 2-year-olds can play piano better than Mozart. Well, I guess we can turn on each other when it comes to handing out Didn’t Happen of the Year Awards, but that’s more an issue of accountability. We just want to make sure that the online lying doesn’t get out of control!