Analysis

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…

An entire network of fake news websites designed to look like local news outlets has vanished without a trace. Most likely it happened in the fall-out of a hoax from a month ago about a security guard at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas supposedly being arrested as the "second shooter" after the mass shooting event on October 1st…

Visitors to Freedum Junkshun, one of Chris Blair's (in)famous satirical fake news sites, reportedly can no longer share links from the site on Facebook. We tested it ourselves and were greeted by this message: It is quite strange how a page that doesn't even exist and which returns a 404 error can be considered spam: http://freedumjunkshun.com/thislinkdoesnotexist. Christopher Blair is a…

Fake/satire website The Resistance: The Last Line Of Defense has announced they are online again in an article titled: "Infamous 'Fake News' Site Resurrected By Russian Trolls". Recently Facebook blocked users from posting links to the site forcing it to adopt a new domain name (nunadisbereel.com). That name now seems to be abandoned (along with the original thelastlineofdefense.org) in favor…

Recently we criticized an article by fake/satire website Freedum Junkshun titled "BREAKING: Black Soldier Killed In Niger Was A Deserter" for using the real name and real image of a soldier who died in Niger (Sergeant La David T. Johnson) and accusing him of being a deserter without the slightest shred of evidence. The website has now pulled this article…

If you've been on the internet for a while you are probably familiar with 'Turing tests' on various websites: little challenges to prove you are an actual human interacting with a site and not a bot intent on spamming a comment form or on the prowl for personal data. Most of these puzzles take the form of a sequence of…

Facebook has blocked the sharing of links from the infamous satirical fake news website "The Resistance: The Last Line Of Defense" as of a few hours ago. Lead Stories has confirmed the block is real by trying to post a link to one of their recent hoaxes about the Seattle Seahawks potentially being banned from the NFL (which we debunked…

The problem with being one of the most widely known writers of fake news stories (that often include your own name) is that nobody will believe a story about you anymore. So when we began seeing online reports about the death of fake news superstar Paul Horner last week our first reaction was sceptical. It seems the initial report came…

Mark Zuckerberg went live on Facebook to discuss Russian election interference and Facebook's next steps to protect the integrity of the democratic process. Watch the full video below: As you can see, the video has racked up almost a million views in about an hour and it is expected to be watched many more times.…

A federal judge ordered Proper Media, LLC, to stop withholding ad revenue from Snopes.com while the court considers who legally controls the hoax-busting website. Snopes parent company Bardav has been struggling to survive since Proper Media, which was contracted to manage the site's publishing stopped passing the money along in a power struggle between rival stockholders. "This is an important…

Paul Horner is a fake news writer and comedian who is said to have influenced the U.S. Presidential Election with his hoaxes. And a few hours ago he revealed a new website named My Phoenix Daily (archived here) via a tweet on a fake Donald Trump twitter account he created last year: Great new site, the best ever, a site…