Regular readers of Lead Stories know we've been following the exploits of Christopher Blair for quite some time now. From taking over right wing Facebook pages with hordes of goats to trolling conservatives with made up stories labeled as satire on Facebook (and then fighting the Macedonian fake news sites that copy them), the least you can say about Mr.…

Readers of Lead Stories know we've been following the work of Christopher Blair (featured in the Boston Globe today by coincidence) for quite some time now. For those of you who don't know him, he's the person behind such iconic satirically trolling news sites as The Last Line of Defense, Reagan Was Right, Ladies of Liberty, Freedum Junkshun, Daily World…

We sometimes get asked by readers why we bother fact checking and debunking stories that were clearly meant as satire and which are properly labeled as such by the sites that published them. We have four main reasons for doing that: Social media cards Plagiarism & copyright infringement Fauxtire Some people are just blinded by bias Before expanding on those…

Experts have warned a crisis is imminent as the world is running out of facts to check. A recent study by the Federal Institute for Statistics on Hoaxes (F.I.S.H.) estimated that every fact in the world would be checked as early as 2022. This would put thousands of fact checkers out of work and could even lead to a global…

Can the website Oilsjt Analytica really guess your name just based on the answers you give to a few questions? Many internet users were stumped today by the website that seems to be a parody on Cambridge Analytica, the firm embroiled in a Facebook data harvesting scandal. It was launched via Twitter only a few hours ago: 😲👉 Na Cambridge…

Remember the Nevada County Scooper? It was a satirical fake news website that disappeared somewhere in 2017 but before it went away it was responsible for such fake story titles as: Donald Trump Tours Chemtrail Plane, Promises to Terminate Program Scaramucci Posts Nude Photos Of His Wife As Revenge For Divorce Facebook to Ban All Flat Earth Groups Doctors Rushing…

You may have noticed we've upped the tempo a bit at Lead Stories in the past few days, posting more stories per day than we used to. And you may have also noticed the images we are using to illustrate our stories have gotten a bit slicker too, with standardized font sizes for our trademark "big splashy red letters" overlay…

Compare following two headlines: Thе rеаsоn аrmy hеlіcоptеrs аrе nаmеd аftеr nаtіvе trіbеs wіll mаkе yоu smіlе The reason Army helicopters are named after native tribes will make you smile Notice anything different about them? OK, the "A" in "army" is capitalized in one case and not in the other but other than that they seem identical, no? That 'a'…

The website of EUvsDisinfo, a project set up by the East StratCom Taskforce of the European Union to fight pro-Kremlin disinformation, has published a public retraction (archived here) on the main page of its website indicating three articles from Dutch media outlets were wrongly labeled as disinformation. This follows after the three media outlets in question (De Gelderlander, GeenStijl and…

The Dutch parliament has approved a motion today calling for the EU to disband the EUvsDisinfo project, a part of the East StratCom Taskforce of the European Union set up to fight pro-Kremlin disinformation. The motion says it is not up to government bodies (at any level) to label publications as fake news and urges the Dutch goverment to take…

Reports are coming in from all over the world that a major outage is happening at Facebook. According to DownDetector.com the outages seem to be concentrated in Western Europe and Asia right now: This problem will undoubtedly affect the many pages and websites using Facebook to spread fake news and hoaxes and will offer a welcome break to us here…

It appears Twitter has temporarily locked a large number of accounts for exhibiting "automated behaviour that violates the Twitter Rules". Users are urged to enable verification of their account via their phone number to unlock their accounts. Many users are also reporting they lost significant numbers of followers leading to speculation that Twitter has been systematically purging bot accounts overnight.…

Popular Dutch weblogs geenstijl.nl and tpo.nl along with the publisher of regional Dutch newspaper De Gelderlander have filed a lawsuit against several European Union defendants inlcuding anti-fake news website EUvsDisinfo for accusing them of publishing "fake news" and "disinformation". They are demanding the accusations are permanently removed from various EU publications and demand publication of a rectification under penalty of…

A recent Newsweek article titled "How an Alt-Right Bot Network Took Down Al Franken" published on February 19th 2018 caused quite a stir online with its claims a Russian bot network in combination with several Japanese fake news websites were instrumental in the resignation of senator Al Franken over a sexual harassment affair. Newsweek later removed the references to the…

Wrestler Mark Calloway, actor Matt LeBlanc, Rapper DMX (aka Earl Simmons), singer Jennifer Lopez, Jaden Smith (son of Will Smith), rapper Tekashi69 (aka Daniel Hernandez), actress Mahira Khan, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, George Lopez, athlete Dwyane Wade (aka The Flash), documentary maker David Attenborough and artist Stan Lee are all victims of the latest celebrity death hoax trend on Twitter.…

On February 15th 2018 an image was posted on the subforum "The Donald" on Reddit (archived here) that was titled "SNOPES.com's only clients are Soros and the DNC". The text in the image read: BUSTED Snopes.com 100% FAKE FACT-CHECKING SITE In 2009 FactCheck.org exposed Snopes.com as an extremely liberal propaganda site with an agenda to discredit anything that appears to…

Something weird appears to be going on with the sharing of links on Twitter to articles on the UK domain name blogspot.co.uk of Google's Blogspot/Blogger service. Blogger is one of the oldest blogging services around. It was created by Pyra Labs and got acquired by Google in 2003. Blogs published on the site end up on subdomains of "blogspot.com" but…

Remember Marjan Zlatanovski, the Macedonian officer at the Ministry of Defence of Macedonia that we wrote about last week? He and his wife had been running a network of fake news websites under their own names at least as far back as 2016 as we discovered to our great surprise. Since the publication of our article nothing much seems to…

A study released on February 6th 2018 by the University of Oxford as part of the Computational Propaganda Research Project was widely used as the source for news articles with headlines like these: Trump Supporters Spread the Majority of Phony News on Social Media - Mother Jones 'Junk' political news shared more widely by Trump backers, study finds - McClatchy…

Lead Stories recently became aware of beaware.com, a website with a domain name registered to a man named "Marjan Zlatanovski" on January 3rd 2018 according to WHOIS records (archived). At first sight it appears to be just another Macedonian fake news website mindlessly copying stories from other websites in order to gain traffic and monetized through advertising. As recently as…