Fact Check: Bee Sting To Penis CANNOT Permanently Enlarge It -- Post Is From A Humor Site

Fact Check

  • by: Ed Payne
Fact Check: Bee Sting To Penis CANNOT Permanently Enlarge It -- Post Is From A Humor Site Fact Check: Bee Sting To Penis CANNOT Permanently Enlarge It -- Post Is From A Humor Site It's A Joke

Can a bee sting to the penis permanently enlarge it? No, that's not true: The story was originally put out in November 2019 (archived here) by a South African satire website named Ihlaya News that previously disguised itself as news and got widely picked up by English-language websites in Africa that didn't realize the source of the story was a joke.

This version of the claim appears in a Facebook post (archived here) on December 18, 2021. Here's what it says:

Bee string to the penis can permanently enlarge your penis

This is what the post looked like on Facebook on December 23, 2021:

Penis.png

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Dec 23 15:08:20 2021 UTC)

Under the title of the ihlayanews.com site, there is a disclaimer that reads "nuusparodie waarvan jy hou." In Afrikaans this means "news parody you like." And "ihlaya" means "a joke" in Zulu. The Facebook page associated with the site has a big disclaimer at the top of the page as well:

ihlayanewsheader-thumb-900xauto-3061727.jpg

(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Dec 23 15:49:16 2021 UTC)

The site previously looked very much like a news website until at least November 2019 but has changed since. It used to post most stories in a category named "FEATURED NEWS" (which would appear three times above each article). That has been changed to just "featured." The name of the site used to be "ihlaya news" before it got changed to "n p a s."

However, the site still misleads many people by having a domain name with "news" in it and by not being more clear about the fictional nature of its content.

Lead Stories has written about ihlayanews.com before. Here are some earlier articles that mention the site:

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Ed Payne

Ed Payne is a staff writer at Lead Stories. He is an Emmy Award-winning journalist as part of CNN’s coverage of 9/11. Ed worked at CNN for nearly 24 years with the CNN Radio Network and CNN Digital. Most recently, he was a Digital Senior Producer for Gray Television’s Digital Content Center, the company’s digital news hub for 100+ TV stations. Ed also worked as a writer and editor for WebMD. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, Ed is the author of two children’s book series: “The Daily Rounds of a Hound” and “Vail’s Tales.” 

Read more about or contact Ed Payne

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion