Fake News: Muslim Leader Did NOT Say "I Swear All The Muslim Will Leave U.S If Trump Ban Sharia Law".

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk
Fake News: Muslim Leader Did NOT Say "I Swear All The Muslim Will Leave U.S If Trump Ban Sharia Law".

Did "a prominent muslim leader" threaten that all muslims will leave the United States if Donald Trump bans sharia law? No, that's not true: the story was just a piece of clickbait spread by a network of foreign websites. The "leader" in question wasn't even identified in the story and the website peddling the claim was riddled with so many ads it made the actual article quasi unreadable.

The story appeared in an article published by a site named TrumpMAGA 2020 on September 17, 2018 titled "Muslim Leader Threatens "I Swear All The Muslim Will Leave U.S If Trump Ban Sharia Law". Do You Support This??" (archived here) which opened:

A prominent Muslim Leader has declared this today "I Swear All The Muslim Will Leave U.S If Trump Ban Sharia Law". Did Trump re...

Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:

Muslim Leader Threatens "I Swear All The Muslim Will Leave U.S If Trump Ban Sharia Law". Do You Support This??

A prominent Muslim Leader has declared this today "I Swear All The Muslim Will Leave U.S If Trump Ban Sharia Law". Did Trump re...

The picture used with the story comes from a video that's been online since at least 2013 about a protest against attacks on monks in India, well before Donald Trump was even president.

The rest of the article completely fails to identify who this supposed "muslim leader" is and consists mostly of advertising and sentences copied from news articles about the 90-day travel ban Trump issued against several muslim-majority countries last year.

The site trumpmaga2020.blogspot.com seems to share several advertising network ID's and other properties with a number of other sites that are part of a network of clickbait sites posting political stories for monetary gain. Based on the domain names of some other sites in the network we suspect the owners probably hail from the Balkan region in Europe, probably Serbia or Macedonia.

trumpmaga2020network.jpg

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  Maarten Schenk

Maarten Schenk is the co-founder and COO/CTO of Lead Stories and an expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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