Analysis

On Sunday August 5, 2018 a fake news website using the URL yahoonews-us.com and a logo from Yahoo! News ran a death hoax about actor Michael J. Fox. Lead Stories was the first fact checking website to debunk the story: Fake News: Beloved Actor And Back To The Future Star Michael J. Fox Has NOT Died At The Age Of…

Yesterday Lead Stories reported on a death hoax involving actor Michael J. Fox which was published by a site pretending to be Yahoo! News: Fake News: Beloved Actor And Back To The Future Star Michael J. Fox Has NOT Died At The Age Of 57 | Lead Stories Did actor Michael J. Fox die at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center from complications…

Were Infowars and Alex Jones permanently banned from Facebook? That remains to be seen. Infowars writer Paul Joseph Watson claimed on Twitter the ban that took down their pages on monday August 6, 2018 was "permanent" but a post on Facebook's newsroom page (and the screenshot that Watson added to his tweet) contradict the claim. Watson tweeted on August 6,…

From the "about damn time" department" comes this trending report that is not fake. Facebook moved against the personal page of InfoWars creator Alex Jones. We know it is true because Facebook says so. "We received reports related to four different videos on the Pages that Infowars and Alex Jones maintain on Facebook," the Facebook spokesperson said. "We reviewed the…

If you have ever visited YouTube you may have noticed news articles are being stolen by shady YouTube channels uploading videos in which a robot voice reads out the text of an article over a slideshow of vaguely related photos. This is not a new phenomenon, it has been going on since at least 2015: There's Bots on Youtube Plagiarizing…

Earlier today Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed broke the news that business and marketing website Bussiness2Community had deleted over 6000 articles written by Shawn Rice (brother of the site's founder Brian Rice) after an investigation revealed a massive plagiarism problem with his articles. As Craig's story noted, Lead Stories was one of the victims of Shawn Rice's behaviour and we are…

About three weeks ago Lead Stories reported on a network of fake news websites apparently centered around Ghana in Africa that was responsible for several huge death hoaxes. After our investigation got too close for comfort the entire network suddenly went down: Global Fake News Network Responsible For Dozens of Death Hoaxes Shuts Down After Ghana Connections Revealed | Lead…

Newsexaminer.net, a website that used to be run by Paul Horner before the fake news superstar died last year has apparently been taken over by a spammer from Vietnam who bought the domain name somewhere in January 2018. The current version of the site (archived here) seems to be automatically reposting articles from fact checking website Snopes.com right now, systematically…

Forget Macedonia, the real capital of fake news might just be Accra in Ghana On April 17, 2018 former First Lady Barbara Bush passed away but a full day earlier an article prematurely announcing her death from a website pretending to be CNN managed to rack up a combined 2.3 million likes, shares and comments on Facebook. Barely a week…

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…