Analysis

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…

Some scammers probably thought they struck gold when they bought the expired domain name of an old satirical fake news website. It seems their plan was to put up a copy of the old articles using the exact same links and then profit from the residual social media and search engine traffic. At least it looks like that was the…

Question: What do British singer David Cassidy, American serial killer Charles Manson, British comedian Ken Dodd, Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai and British actor Malcom Hebden have in common? Answer: They were all declared dead recently by the same network of fake news websites shortly after they were admitted to hospital with various health problems. (In the case of Cassidy…

Meet the website "American President Donald J. Trump" which is published by "A Tested and Trustworthy Team" according to its own subheader. But is it really? First of all a warning: most of the links in this article will lead to sites that heavily feature pop-up ads and other sneaky advertising tricks. Clicking anywhere on these websites will usually open…

Fascinating to observe it happening "in the wild" and almost live. Last friday the fake news website conservativedaily.info was still happily posting fake news stories (including one that we debunked earlier about the renaming of the President Barack Obama Highway) when suddenly the lights went out and all links to the site started returning "403 Forbidden" errors. At the same…

Buzzfeed released an analysis of the top 50 fake news stories of 2017 which you should definitely read. Many of the stories in the list have been debunked at some point by Lead Stories so there are no surprises there for our regular readers but it is an interesting read nonetheless. Just for fun we decided to do a quick…

As we reported in our previous article liberal troll extraordinaire Christopher Blair has been on the warpath against "Conservative Stamp", a "real" fake news website that was stealing content from Blair's network of satirical fake news sites. The campaign already had some successes with Facebook blocking sharing of links to the site and several articles being taken down. Now it…

For regular readers of Lead Stories Christopher Blair needs no more introduction. They can skip the next paragraph. Others are kindly invited to keep reading. Blair is a self-professed liberal troll from Maine who has made it his full time job to troll gullible conservatives and Trump supporters into liking and sharing his articles, even though they are usually clearly…

Recently a fake news website named abcnews-us.com which imitated the real ABC News posted a flurry of fake news stories: A napping morgue employee being cremated by accident Legal marijuana in Wisconsin A funeral home where the son of the owner built a sex doll out of body parts All these stories were hoaxes and some of them were copied…

Prolific prankster and internet troll Christopher Blair just launched another website to poke fun at unsuspecting conservatives who tend to think his stories are real and who often like, share and comment them into going viral. The name of the new site is "Ladies of Liberty" and right in the launch announcement it is made clear it will publish only…

Earlier this week we reported that fake/satire site "Freedum Junkshun" had been put on a blacklist by Facebook so it became impossible to share links to it on the social network. This followed the earlier ban on The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense, another site from the same network that simply switched domain names and has been back in…