No, 'Harambe McHarambeface' Did Not Win Gorilla Naming Contest
By Bridget O'Donnell
A website called 'Boston Leader' recently published a piece claiming that a naming contest for a baby gorilla at Jinhua Zoo in Zhejiang took a surprising turn after the winning entry was revealed to be 'Harambe McHarambeface.'
The article in question.
The name, an apparent tribute to the 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla that was shot and killed earlier this year at the Cincinnati Zoo, supposedly captured 93 percent of the total vote.
Harambe has become a bit of a posthumous celebrity following widespread outrage after zoo officials shot him to death when a three-year-old boy entered his enclosure. His death has sparked the spread of various dark humor memes, and even prompted a New York Times trend piece on the phenomenon. The Zoo was barraged with so many memes that it decided to deactivate its Twitter account late last month.
The strange name was also apparently created in reference to another public vote held earlier this year, which saw 'Boaty McBoatface' become the winning entry for a British polar research ship. The Philadelphia Zoo, meanwhile, held a similar naming contest and earned tons of 'Harambe' submissions earlier this month.
Boston Leader cited unnamed "Chinese-language media" as stating that the most popular entry up until last week was '黑金' (Heijin, literally 'Black Gold'), which had received several hundred votes on the zoo's website. They then went on to say that a link to the site was shared on social media platforms in the US, leading thousands of trolls to flood the polls with a new name suggestion, 'Harambe McHarambeface.' That entry supposedly ended up winning after earning 73,345 votes.
"We had no idea our contest would attract so much attention from overseas," a Jinhua Zoo official (anonymous, of course) was quoted as saying to the unnamed local media, adding that zoo management were "stunned" by the level of international interest in the contest. The spokesperson also reportedly said that the zoo would accept 'Harambe McHarambeface' as the gorilla's official English name, but that they would continue to use 'Heijin' as its Chinese name.
Does this hilarious combination of memes all seem too good (and way too meta) to be true? That's because it probably is.
A search for terms like 'Harambe McHarambeface,' 'Heijin,' 'Gorilla' and 'Jinhua Zoo' yield no results on any Chinese news or social media platforms in both Chinese and English. The zoo itself also hasn't been in the news recently.
A search for terms related to this story returns zero results.
And while it's true that the Jinhua Zoo does exist, there are no gorillas listed on its official website, which hasn't posted any new updates since 2013. Likewise, no mention of the recent vote can be found anywhere on the site or its social media platforms (which appear to have last been updated in May of this year).
Meanwhile, a search for the competition on popular Western social media networks only returns results for the Boston Leader story from September 10. That's odd, considering the tens of thousands of American web users who supposedly spread word of the poll via common social networking platforms.
No mentions of the Zoo's official website appear on Twitter and other Western social networks.
The Boston Leader itself has a dubious background. While the website claims it's been "bringing you Boston's best news since 1932," a simple WHOIS search shows that the domain name was actually registered on September 9, 2016.
Anonymous officials, a zoo without gorillas and no official Chinese news sources? We're gonna go ahead and call this story a hoax.
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