Analysis

Yesterday Eli Saslow at the Washington Post wrote a fantastic article about Christopher Blair, a man from Maine who has been trolling conservatives and Trump supporters online for years and occasionally even made a living out of it. Blair's main website and Facebook page are named "America's Last Line of Defense" and he uses them to publish various articles and…

YourNewsWire used to be one of the most notorious websites spreading fake news, often by using bits and pieces of real news articles from other websites to create new articles which would then get a headline and introduction that would greatly overstate or even outright lie about what was really happening. Earlier this year Poynter did a profile about the…

Recently the BBC World Service's "Trending" programme did a two part story about Christopher Blair, the liberal troll and internet hoaxer well known to anybody who has been following Lead Stories' reporting on him. Christopher has made it his day job to troll conservatives and Trump supporters online with outrageous stories that get them so excited they like and share…

Readers of this site are probably aware that some of the content found on Macedonian fake news websites is often copied directly from the satirical sites and Facebook pages of Christopher Blair and his friends. On those sites and pages they write over the top fake stories specifically designed to get less intellectually gifted Trump supporters and conservatives excited enough…

A story about protesters vandalizing Brett Kavanaugh's house to the tune of $11,000 in damages went viral about four days ago and was first debunked by Lead Stories. It originated from a liberal satire website run by Christopher Blair but went massively viral in part because a copy of the article appeard on a fake news website using the logo…

Less than two weeks ago we reported on a network of prank websites centered around thefakenewsgenerator.com being blocked as spam by Facebook. But now it seems the site is gearing up for a restart by using the advanced hacking technique of adding a dash to the domain name in order to get around the filters. Here is our report on…

Recently a rash of new viral fake news stories started turning up on Facebook, all from sites associated with thefakenewsgenerator.com, a site run by a man named Justin Hook. He was profiled by The Daily Dot only a few days ago: This fake news generator is a head-turning troll machine Fake news is still a sensitive subject. Nearly 70 percent…

COLORADO SPRINGS/BRUSSELS/LONDON -- Fact checking website Lead Stories (leadstories.com) and artificial intelligence startup Factmata (factmata.com) are happy to announce they will be collaborating in the fight against fake news by exchanging data and sharing digital tools. Both companies are strongly convinced the cooperation will be mutually beneficial and both will gain valuable resources to help them accomplish their respective goals.…

COLORADO SPRINGS/BRUSSELS/HOUSTON -- Fact checking website Lead Stories (leadstories.com) and the fakery education and debunking Facebook page Unfakery (Facebook.com/Unfakery) are happy to announce they will be collaborating in the fight against fake news by exchanging data and sharing digital tools. Both organisations are strongly convinced the cooperation will be mutually beneficial and both will gain valuable resources to help them…

Regular readers of this site are doubtlessly familiar with notorious fake news website YourNewsWire.com. Over the years we have debunked countless stories from it, and we are not the only fact checking website that regularily took aim at hoaxes spread by the site. But now it looks like the site has had its reach fatally reduced by Facebook around the…

Another one of Christopher Blair's websites bites the dust. Lead Stories just learned that links to any article on the website "America's Last Line of Defense" are now considered "spam" by Facebook. The website in question was satirical in nature with several disclaimers, hints and warnings spread all over the page (including in the header). It published over-the-top fake stories…

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…