Mike Snider, and Jon Swartz

USA TODAY

YouTube star food reviewer TheReportOfTheWeek found himself posting an unplanned video late Monday night — not on a new junk food craze, but to let fans know he was safe.

The well-known YouTube video creator (in interviews he has only revealed his first name is John) was among several people who were falsely listed on social media as missing in the wake of the Monday night bombing in Manchester, England, at an Ariana Grande concert. At least 22 people died and many more were injured in the blast, according to the Greater Manchester Police Department.

After seeing his picture passed along online as one of the missing in the wake of the concert bombing, he posted a video debunking the report.

"Some people propagated a certain rumor claiming that I was a victim," he said in the video. "I’m just making this video to let you know I am indeed alive and well and OK here in the United States. This unfortunately was just an effort done by various trolls and certain website users just to try to mislead the general public with fake news and just to try to get some laughs out of it."

Online hoaxes predate the rise of viral fake news, so it was inevitable they would become yet another wrinkle in the growth of misleading and outright false messaging. The false identification of victims and terrorist suspects routinely follow tragedies, say sociology and journalism experts.

“We’ve always had people with distorted views, attention-seeking at any cost,” says Zeynep Tufekci, adjunct professor of sociology at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, which explores how the digital world has reshaped the public sphere and how social movements operate.

“New tools (in social media) have allowed almost anyone to reach more people with a mechanism that can go viral,” she says. “Troubled people aren’t new, but the structure that enables them to spread falsehoods has a magnified scale and incentive/rewards structure.”

She calls it the modern-day equivalent of kids spreading rumors at a middle-school to see the fallout. And users don't realize what's happening.

“When people first went to the movies and saw a train coming at them, they ran,” Tufekci says. “They didn’t know any better — and the same is happening to us in the social-media era.”

After the bombing at the concert, attended by many young people and parents escorting their children, social media became a way to confirm friends' safety. But some opted to use the tragedy as an opportunity to increase their social media following or simply to stir confusion.

For instance, TheReportOfTheWeek and several other Internet personalities were among people whose faces were used in a collage that was spread across Twitter and retweeted by several media outlets including U.K. tabloid the Daily Mail, reported BuzzFeed. Eventually, another version of the collage began circulating with checkmarks for found concert attendees and Xs marking photos of fake reports.

Also, one Twitter handle (@gamergateantifa), an apparent reference to the GamerGate movement — an often harsh and sometimes life-threatening online argument over gaming culture that peaked in 2014 — spread a picture of TheReportOfTheWeek purporting to be his worried father.

Another Net celebrity @EvaDeMetal saw herself in a Twitter post and responded sarcastically, "They inform me that I am lost or dead in Manchester. If someone find me please let me know."

Also spread on Twitter and Instagram, Mashable reported, were photos of Grande, with her face bloody, supposedly from the bombing scene but actually from the set of Fox TV show Scream Queens two years ago.

Another post, purportedly seeking news about a missing brother, misappropriated a photo of a boy with Down syndrome who modeled clothes for a new fashion line for children with Down syndrome two years ago on DailyMail.com.

After seeing photos of her daughter on Twitter as a missing person in Manchester, photographer Rachel Devine posted on Facebook that she was safe and at school in Melbourne, Australia. "Apparently someone used a photo of Gemma in a fake profile on Twitter claiming she was a friend lost in the tragedy in Manchester," said Devine, a photographer who lives in Australia and L.A., according to her Tumblr page.

"I'll never understand the bizarre thing of pretending to be someone else online," she continued. "Nor the tragedy at the concert. My thoughts go out to those parents and since a news agency contacted me, I hope this clears it up and the 'news' takes her photo down."

There is precedent in "high-drama social events" for others to repeat behavior once it's out there, said Rita McGrath, a professor of management at Columbia Business School. "Remember the creepy clowns from last year?" McGrath said. "Once one person starts to do creepy clown stuff, other people, say, 'Oh, it’s a meme. Maybe I can get in on that.' It’s like it’s an attention train. ... It does a lot of harm."

About the practice of knowingly spreading fake news to boost an online audience, Twitter user jackdwagner posted: "Teens are making up fake 'missing' friends at the ariana grande concert to get RT's. this is so dystopian."

Follow USA TODAY reporter Mike Snider and San Francisco Bureau Chief Jon Swartz on Twitter: @MikeSnider & @jswartz.