The well-known satirical fake news website The Last Line of Defence published an article on March 4th 2017 titled "BREAKING: Two Famous Black Lives Matter Activists Shot Dead By Secret Service" claiming two men were killed by the Secret Service for planning the kidnapping of Melania Trump. The article starts as follows:
A pair of liberal activists, famous for their roles in the Black Lives Matter thuggery, were shot dead by the Secret Service. The pair were holed up in an apartment in New York City planning an attack on Trump Tower when a tactical team attempted to serve an arrest warrant and apprehend them.
The article continues with a quote attributed to Breitbart News:
The Secret Service obtained intel that implicated LaShaun DeMarcus and George Maclerius Smith, two high-ranking members of BLM, as ringleaders of a domestic terrorism cell planning to kidnap First Lady Melania Trump.The pair refused to be taken into custody and fired on the agents, who had no choice but to use deadly force. The First Lady and her son, Baron, have been evacuated and taken to an undisclosed location.
Note that the link to the supposed article at Breitbart actually goes to a collection of "U So Dumb" memes, an example of which is pictured below:
If that doesn't convince you the article is totally a hoax and entirely made up: 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
As of the time of writing no other hoax debunking site like Snopes has disputed this article but we don't doubt this will happen soon enough.
Despite insulting the intelligence of anyone actually reading the article it has been shared around widely as you can see in the Trendolizer graph at the end of this article. If you notice anyone spreading a copy of the story from another site without the satire disclaimer you can help by pointing them to this article here because nobody likes being duped by fake news sites using satirical articles to drive advertising clicks.
