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 or less grammatical sentences in combination with some fake-news related hashtags. In addition the bot automatically generates "meme" images to go with the tweet by taking the text and superimposing it onto some vaguely related background image.
The result: @TruthPatroller, a bot spewing vaguely plausible conspiracy news on Twitter. But the brilliant part is its twin, @FakePatroller, which immediately debunks the claims with a reply tweet by adding an extra word in front of the text, swapping some hashtags and slapping a big "FAKE" label over the image.
This is taking automated fake news hunting to the next level. Hat tip to the creator: we're impressed!
