Satirical fake news site The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense managed to get another fake article to go viral. The piece is titled: "BREAKING: George Soros Killed While Visiting His Home Country" and it opens like this:
George Soros, the billionaire activist who funds all of the liberal trolls on social media and pays for the anti-Trump demonstrations that turn into riots, has been killed in a small engine plane crash while visiting his home country of Hungaria. His plane went down somewhere in the Alps and hasn't been recovered, but satellite images confirm that there's nothing left but rubble.
And of course the article mentions nobody else has confirmed the crash (except for the control tower). But it is safe to say the entire story is bogus. The reason is that The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense is a fake news website that carries following disclaimer on its about page:
DISCLAIMER: The Resistance may include information from sources that may or may not be reliable and facts that don't necessarily exist. All articles should be considered satirical and any and all quotes attributed to actual people complete and total baloney. Pictures that represent actual people should be considered altered and not in any way real.
The site also tends to include nonsensical phrases or insults hints in the list of "categories" under the article titles:
According to Buzzfeed the site was originally meant to troll conservatives with over the top satirical articles but now appears to be used as a 'source' by a large network of actual fake news sites (not related to the original creator) that all repost the same articles mentioning it as the source but not acknowlediging the satire disclaimer. This causes many people to believe the fake stories especially when they are being shared on social media where all context is removed and only the title, image and description remain. Sites in the network appear to include:
- American News
- Newsbreakshere
- Amposts
- Conservative Info corner
- Conservative Army
- Open Magazines
- True Trumpers
- Blue Vision News
- Conservative Flash News
- Red Country
- Newsfeedhunter
It probably won't take long for this story to start popping up on sites like these as well, adding to the confusion.
The original is well underway to break 1000 likes at the time of writing, as the Trendolizer graph at the end of this article shows. If you notice anyone spreading the rumor around you can help by pointing them to this article here because nobody likes fake news.
