Newspunch

Did Senator Chuck Grassley "vow to imprison" anybody falsely accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh? No, that's not true. Infamous fake news website YourNewsWire made the claim in a headline and then later changed "imprison" to "prosecute" but evidence of the change remains visible in the URL of the story and in an archived version (along with several partially plagiarised…

CNN's chief Jeff Zucker did not order his producers and reporters to squash any reporting on violence in Chicago as a way to protect Democrats from criticism, contrary to a story that's trending on social media. In fact, Zucker is not calling the shots at CNN for a while since he recently began a two-month medical leave to deal with…

Did former President Barack Obama say he supports the seizure of white farmer's land in South Africa? No, that's a fake quote, made up by a website that plagiarises articles from other websites about real news events and then adds some invented claims in the headline and first paragraphs to attract more clicks and make more advertising money. The quotes…

The alleged connection between NXIVM and Hillary Clinton has been a popular conspiracy theory for weeks since a Seattle man claimed he saw Clinton aide Huma Abedine and her ex-husband and former congressman Anthony Weiner at a sex cult "mixer" in 2007. Ben Szemkus also said he met Stormy Daniels, the porn star who says she had sex with Donald…

Did Melissa Hodgman, wife of FBI agent Peter Strzok, block all FBI investigations of Clinton-related cases? No, that's not true and the article claiming she did directly contradicts itself. The headline making the claim was made up by a site that liberally copy-pastes content from other sites and then adds some made up facts to its own headlines and introductory…

Did the U.K. government "accidentally" sell 10,000 children to child traffickers? No, that's not true: the claim was made by a site that takes real news articles and then adds some invented facts to the headline and first paragraphs of its own version of the story, often involving pedophiles or conspiracies. The people behind the site presumably do this to…

Did Angela Merkel or the German government ban German media from reporting on a migrant who also killed his 1-year-old daughter when he murdered his ex-wife in a stabbing attack? No, that's not true: the story and the killer's motives were widely reported in Germany right after the attack happened in April 2018. The claim that the German goverment tried…

Will Australian parents who don't vaccinate their children get bankrupted by the state? No, that's not really true: the claim was made by a website that habitually takes bits of real news and then adds an incendiary headline of its own in order to get people to click through to their website so they can earn money via advertising. The…

Will Judge Jeanine Pirro be the next justice on the Supreme Court and has President Donald Trump confirmed this? No, that's not true. The news was made up by a site that likes to take tidbits of real news and events and then adds a headline to their own version of the story to make it more clickbait-worthy in order…

Was Clare Bronfman, the heiress to the Seagram fortune who was indicted in the case surrounding the NXIVM sex cult, a former Clinton aide? No, that's not true: she was just one of many donors to Hillary Clinton's campaign but she played no direct role in it. She was certainly not one of "her closest aides". That story was made…