OMGFacts is gone and Dr. Martin Luther King did not spend his last night on Earth having sex with two women.

Okay,..that doesn’t seem like much of a fact right? Well, this isn’t one of my regular posts.

For those who don’t know @OMGFacts, you’d probably be interested to know that they are the most retweeted user on Twitter. In their own words..

“Apparently people like to know pointless things.”

Well it turns out not everything is as pointless as it seems.

What the Fact?

At 23:00 GMT the website and that twitter account are gone; all you get is a page saying “Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!” The reason? If you’re gonna try to bring some humour into your blog, don’t bring MLKs integrity into question on MLK day!

OMGFacts posted a fact on their blog today that Martin Luther King Spent his last night on Earth having sex with two women. The trouble is it’s not necessarily true. In fact, they held back somewhat on the details or things could’ve been much worse for them. The original source is, I suspect, much graver than they mentioned.

Where Did It Come From?

If my hunch is right, they took their source from an article on www.MartinLutherKing.org called “The Beast as Saint: The truth about Martin Luther King Jr.”; which is a pretty damning article to say the least. The statements they referred to were made by a Gerard Eisterhold who was an exhibit designer at The National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee who also claimed there was a third women whom MLK beat and abused.

That Can’t Be True Can It?

Now I’ll be honest and say I hope to god that Mr. Eisterhold was lying. I’m much more inclined to think this was some sort of publicity stunt but if we’re being honest with ourselves there’s little chance we can ever really know for sure. Even so, if it’s Martin Luther King day,..better keep that quiet! More than that, even if it were true, the world would be better not knowing.

Where It All Went Wrong

The mistake OMGFacts made was not that they posted something highly doubtful and slanderous about MLK but that they did it today, on MLK day. Factropolis.com posted a fact on Oct 4 last year saying that MLK lip synced most of the ‘I Have A Dream’ speech. There was a bit more noise in the comments but nothing like the backlash OMGFacts have had. In fact, the hashtag #UnfollowOMGFacts has actually trended on twitter! I’d like to give OMGFacts the benefit of the doubt here and make the assumption that they didn’t mean to offend anyone,..anyone short of MLK I guess.

Should We Let Them Off?

From what I can tell, OMGFacts are made up of a couple of young kids who were lucky enough to take-off on Twitter and posted something a little insensitive. Trouble is the internet forgets nothing so this might take them down for a while. I think what they should do is post an apology as soon as they can and I hope people will understand it was a stupid mistake. Am I right?

UPDATE: OMGFacts Are Back.

As of 01/27/2010 Adorian seems to have reinstated his twitter account and has begun posting facts again. The website now redirects directly to his twitter page.

No apology as yet and I doubt we’ll get one but I reckon it’s all water under the bridge now. Nice to have you back Adorian; you’re always welcome to guest post on here,..just as long as you actually check the facts you’re putting on!