​The Tall Tale of the Syria Lads – The World’s Fastest Unravelling News Story

Ever gone too hard on a night out and woken up dribbling on yourself in the middle of nowhere because you passed out on the night bus? Imagine doing that, but ending up in the middle of a war zone. That's what three British club reps claimed to have done – accidentally sailing to Syria after they got on the wrong boat on the way home from a club in Cyprus.

Syria lads is the kind of tall story that wtf viral content is made for – three British lads, out on the lash, waking up in what the Global Peace Index today declared the most violent country in the world.

The Daily Mirror was straight on the story – publishing the lads' tale, in which they described attempting to go straight-through after a night out in Ayia Napa to an early morning dolphin-watching boat trip. Halfway into the journey, they realised that they were on a 100-mile trip to the Syrian port of Tartus. In short: a story that sounds so obviously untrue, so unequivocally made up for shits and giggles, so unfathomable, so completely the actual definition of #ladsontour, that you can only want to believe it.

Club rep and group spokesman Lewis Ellis, 25, whose Facebook intro says he's the sort of person who will take "any opportunity [that] presents itself" told the Mirror: "The last club closed at 7.30am so we just powered through to our 9am boat trip and ended up blagging our way on to the wrong boat." Lol.

"We were wearing our boardshorts, hungover, looking like we were ready for a boat party," he said. "Everyone was foreign and it was pretty much half way out from the island when we asked 'how come we're so far away from land?'"

"We got pretty far out and at that point we were looking at each other thinking, 'What the fuck do we do now?' We were panicking and saying to these guys, 'You need to turn around'." Then one of them posted something on Facebook and the geotag revealed they were in Syria, which was not so lol.

In what was possibly the quickest unravelling of a news story, people rightly started to call bullshit on the lads' story. Someone checked Lewis' Facebook timeline and found him bragging to one of his mates: "Naaa we just made it up for fun," he wrote.

By this point, the Sun, the Star, Metro, Mail Online, TIME and NEWS.com.au, had all picked up on it. Why? Because it was too good not to. We live in a world where people share and like and lol at NSFW videos and viral articles. You – the readers – want content, and you want it now. Editors want content because readers want content and if they don't publish, someone else will.

The Telegraph's headline sums it up. "Hungover Brits say they 'travelled to Syria by mistake' after boarding wrong boat - but is all as it seems?" It's probably quite obvious that all is not as it seems given the guy has just admitted it was a lie to all his mates on Facebook. But what publication wants to miss out on on a story with that level of viral potential. Who even cares if it's true or not?

Elsewhere – the stories are still up, although some have slightly altered headlines. Except for the Express, which at time of publication is still taking the story as fact and nicked the Mirror's quotes without even sourcing them.

It takes roughly five seconds to do a sweep of a source's Facebook account to find out if you're being led – which is five seconds other media outlets have ahead of you in this race to the bottom. As the old tabloid adage goes – "never let the truth get in the way of a good story". The Mirror, its readers, hell, all of us — wanted the story to be true. Because the idea of a group of hungover Brits being so out of it they travelled to Syria when all they wanted was to see a couple of majestic dolphins frolicking about in the ocean is so preposterous amid the mundanity of our own Wednesday mornings, we all want it to be real.

It also turns out that marketing grad Lewis is no stranger to having his name in headlines. Earlier this year he made headlines after filming himself swimming in a decorative pool at Manchester's Trafford Centre for his YouTube channel. He's even used the whole stunt to promote his videos.

Now? He's laughing his arse off. "Okay so we trolled the world," he wrote. "Thank you media outlets you've made great victims… just goes to show how often people report without checking facts."

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