Did Governor Jerry Brown of California outlaw homelessness? No, that's not exactly true. A website known for taking real bits of news from other sites and then adding a headline and a few paragraphs of unsupported facts to spice things up has been at it again. Their goal appears to be profit driven, it looks like they want to get people excited and angry enough to share and like the story so they make money from advertising.
The story originated from an article published on May 2, 2018 on YourNewsWire titled "California Gov. Jerry Brown Outlaws Homelessness" (archived here) which opened:
California Governor Jerry Brown has outlawed homelessness in Los Angeles, banning tens of thousands of vagrants from using cars and RVs as temporary shelter.
Under cruel new laws, it is now illegal to sleep in a car or RV between 9 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Themindunleashed.com reports: Fines will range anywhere from $25 to $75 which is impossible to pay for most people in these situations.
The real part of this story is that the City of Los Angeles has some new regulations governing where people who want to sleep in their car or RV are allowed to park for the night:
New LA city rules limit where homeless in cars can park
New restrictions on when and where homeless people who live in their vehicles can park take effect today in the city of Los Angeles. People who use their RVs and cars as homes will no longer be able to park within 500 yards of schools, day care centers and parks.
Calling this a ban on homelessness (or that it outlaws it completely) is quite a stretch although activists may describe it as such for rhetorical effect. But the city of Los Angeles is only a small part of the state of California and it is not up to the governor of the state to set parking policy for individual cities. So the connection with Jerry Brown is completely made up.
This isn't the first time YourNewsWire falsely claims Jerry Brown did something that was unconnected to him:
Fake News: California Gov. Jerry Brown NOT To Ban Sales Of The Bible | Lead Stories
STORY UPDATED: check for updates below. Is California governor Jerry Brown preparing to ban sales of the bible? No, that's not true. The claim was made by a website that habitually takes some real news and then adds a few paragraphs and an inflammatory headline to make it sound much, much worse than what is really going on in order to get people to click and share the article on social media.
YourNewsWire has published several hoaxes and fake news articles in the past so anything they write or publish should be taken with a large grain of salt. Their Facebook page "The People's Voice" recently lost its verification checkmark according to a report from MMFA.
The Terms of Use of the site also make it clear they don't really stand behind the accuracy of any of their reporting:
THE PEOPLE'S VOICE, INC. AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE SUITABILITY, RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, TIMELINESS, AND ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION, SOFTWARE, PRODUCTS, SERVICES AND RELATED GRAPHICS CONTAINED ON THE SITE FOR ANY PURPOSE.
The site was profiled in the Hollywood reporter where it was described as:
Your News Wire, a 3-year-old website of murky facts and slippery spin, is published by Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Sinclair Treadway -- a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016 -- out of an apartment in L.A.'s historic El Royale.
RationalWiki described it as:
YourNewsWire (styled as YourNewsWire.com[1]) is an Los Angeles-based clickbait fake news website known for disseminating conspiracy theories and misleading information, contrary to its claimed motto ("News. Truth. Unfiltered").[1]
A while ago we also reported that YourNewsWire had rebranded itself as NewsPunch by changing its domain name in an apparent effort to evade filtering/blocking. It appears the site has changed back to it's old name in the mean time but you can still see the NewsPunch name in the contact email address in the footer.
We wrote about yournewswire.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:
- Fake News: North Korea Did NOT Agree To Open Its Doors To Christianity (Yet?)
- Fake News: Pope Francis Did NOT Calls On US Authorities To Disarm The Population
- Fake News: Snopes NOT Finally Exposed As CIA Operation
- Fake News: Israel Did NOT Drop Tactical Nuclear Bomb On Syria
- Fake News: 'Smallville' Star Did NOT Confess She Sold Children To Rothschilds And Clintons
