Analysis

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…

The fake news website USA Daily News Posts (usadailynewsposts.com), also known as "American President Donald J. Trump", has made it a habbit to post fake celebrity quotes and then asking their readers if they "support this" or if the celebrity in question should be arrested, deported or what have you. Often the posts contain errors against basic English, for example…

Fake news site As American As Apple Pie posted an article titled "Muslim Mayor Outlaws Christmas 2017 Within City Limits" which claimed: The Muslim Mayor of Blairsville, a small suburb of Dearborn, Michigan, has declared by executive action that Christmas decorations, music or festivities of any kind in view of the public is "offensive to the majority of residents and…

OK, we give up. We thought that we here at Lead Stories were clever with our Trendolizer engine to quickly find emerging fake news stories to debunk. But we must admit we've been beaten. Some bright person came up with the genius idea to have a Twitter bot automatically generate fake news by slapping random conspiracy phrases together into more…

As of a few hours ago all links to articles on the notorious fake news website yournewswire.com seem to be getting redirected to newspunch.com. The move has not been officially announced on the site as far as we can tell. It seems likely the move is an effort to dodge various fake news filters on social media and in search…

Twitter user @BelfastBrit0151 posted following tweet and image: @AldiUK Well I won't be shopping in Aldi anymore. everyone should retweet this. pic.twitter.com/Oko64gla7T -- Ethan (@BelfastBrit0151) August 19, 2017 The image in the tweet (archived here) shows a till in an Aldi supermarket with a printed sign affixed to it that reads "NO ALCOHOL IS ABLE TO BE SERVED ON THIS…

In the wake of today's terror attack with a van in Barcelona both current president Trump and former president Obama sent out tweets expressing solidarity. And even though Obama's tweet was sent out about 75 minutes after Trump's it has already gotten more likes and retweets: Michelle and I are thinking of the victims and their families in Barcelona. Americans…

Legendary fact checking website Snopes.com just posted an appeal to their site asking for donations via a GoFundMe page. Apparently the company or person they contracted with to run their website is holding it hostage and is refusing to pass on the advertising revenue. Right now it looks like there are no ads running on the site at all. The…

On June 15th and 16th Lead Stories/Trendolizer was present at a TechForum event in Brussels where fact-checkers and journalists from several European countries came together to discuss fact-checking, debunking and the "fake news" phenomenon. One of the more interesting ideas to come out of a brainstorming session was the realization that the people liking and sharing fake news on Facebook…

In a delicious twist of irony a famous satirical fake news website manages to take down or seriously hamper dozens of "real" fake news sites using nothing but copyright law. Here at Lead Stories we have a long history of debunking articles originating from "The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense", a website that constantly publishes fake news and hoaxes…

This is too funny: notorious hoax website The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense published an article that is (for once) mostly true: "BREAKING: Liberal Troll Responsible For Tucker Carlson Death Hoax Admits Who Paid Him". It is a reaction to the recent Tucker Carlson death hoax we debunked earlier as one of the first fact checking websites to do…