Fake News: LA Times Did NOT Report Donald Trump Admitted Being A Nazi In A Speech

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk
Fake News: LA Times Did NOT Report Donald Trump Admitted Being A Nazi In A Speech

Did the Los Angeles Times report President Donald Trump admitted to being a Nazi in a speech? No, that's not true: a prank website with a domain name that is almost identical to the real LA Times published a webpage that looked just like an LA Times article on social media but when clicked it revealed a video of Rick Astley singing "Never Gonna Give You Up", a classic joke known as "Rick Rolling".

You can see the supposed article here (archived here) on the "LA TLmes" under the title "Donald Trump Admits He Is A Nazi In Speech".

This is what users on social media would see:

Donald Trump Admits He Is A Nazi In Speech

This is what the site looked like when the article was clicked:

rickroll.jpg

Here is the Wikipedia definition of Rick Rolling, in case you haven't been on the internet for very long:

Rickrolling

Rickrolling, alternatively rick-rolling, is a prank and an Internet meme involving an unexpected appearance of the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song " Never Gonna Give You Up". The meme is a type of bait and switch using a disguised hyperlink that leads to the music video.

The website www.latlmes.com (not www.latimes.com, notice the lower-case letter "L" instead of the "i") is a prank website where anyone can upload a headline and pick a video to go with it in order to fool friends online. It appears to be the work of @realjeffkeen. Well played, sir!


  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident 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.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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