You can usually determine a site’s validity in about 5 seconds by looking at three things: disclaimers located at the footer of the front-/home-page (if you’re lucky and the site actually has one!); the number (and sometimes type) of ads on the site; images for the articles. So when we went to the article submitted for City World News (Handicapped…
“If wishes were fishes, we’d all cast nets.” That Frank Hubert Dune quote immediately sprung to mind when we saw this article from www.toeindia.in. Toeindia.in stands for “Times of Everything,” whatever that means. And the fine folks at LGBTQ Nation already discussed the hoax nature on this story, as well as two other ridiculous Toeindia.in stories. [Editor’s Note: We’ll revisit…
God Hates Goths would be another example of Poe’s Law, which we have covered before, were it not for their disclaimer page — DISCLAIMER : The Godhatesgoths website, Parents Against Goth Movement and Gods Hammer Baptist Church are complete works of fiction. It is a satire/parody. — which shows up first when you search Google for “God Hates Goths.” Whether…
To whomever it may concern: There is no such site as Empirenews.com. There is an empiresports.co, which we have reviewed here.
When we went to The National Sun’s Facebook page, the first thing we’re greeted with was — — and instantly we wanted to believe everything they had to say. I mean . . . look at him! Really, take a look at him!!! Alas, their About section reveals their true nature: There’s also the Disclaimer on their website: The National…
Content heavily reliant on lists have been the bane of many people’s leisure-time reading since time immemorial. Well . . . maybe not that long, but we get lists all the time, from Rolling Stone to David Letterman. Billboard Magazine is practically just one big-ol’ list and BuzzFeed got its initial, ahem, buzz from their high turnover list-rate. Which is…
One of the ways to check if a news source is legit is to simply look at the site itself. At first glance, Empire Herald seems fairly legit — the site looks polished and well formatted. But the site’s footer is ripe with broken/non-existent links, particularly the contact us and advertise links, both of which point to a # relative…
I’m gonna keep this one short and simple, because half the time I go to www.news-house.org, I’m hit with a ‘bad gateway 502’-error. The article that was submitted was about how a kid used Google Earth to find someone who had been trapped on a deserted island for 7 years. It’s bogus. There’s another article that talks about Apple’s $1billion-in-nickles…
Anything with “newstimesdaily.com” affixed to the URL is Clickbait/JokeLink. Anything.
The Onion is one of the only satire website on the internet that does satire really well. If you didn’t realize that an Onion article was satire, you probably weren’t properly reading (and subsequently laughing).
Viral Worthy can’t even be original enough to come up with a better name for itself. It’s another Upworthy clone. Another in a long list of Upworthy clones. Viral Worthy basically scours the ‘Net for something that is “amazing” and “unbelievable” and “shocking” and re-post it. An example would be their post: 33 AMAZINGLY USEFUL WEBSITES YOU NEVER KNEW EXISTED.…
Per their Facebook page: "The Red Rock Tribune is a conservative news and opinion website."
breakingnews247.net is another in a long list of prank sites (aka Lazy ClickBait). The site is upfront about what it is ("Prank your friends now!") but if you're not paying attention, you could get caught-out!
TMZ World News is likely banking on the familiarity of TMZ to add credibility (which for some is part of the joke in and of itself). But on their contact us page: Tmzworldnews.com is the most notorious satire website in the world with the most shocking Satire News to keep its visitors in a state of disbelief. In fact, TMZWorldNews.com…
UPDATE – 08-03-2016: We have slightly revised our judgment on Breitbart in light of their consistent policy of going well beyond headline-hyperbole with their articles into downright lying when it suits them: Obama’s post-Ramadan statement giving thanks to the “achievements and contributions of Muslim Americans to building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy”…
“Real or Satire Clicked on www.boredomtherapy.com and What They Discovered Will Shock and Awe You Into New Stratospheres of Amazeballsness.” This should give you some idea as to what Boredom Therapy is: clickbait bordering on emoterrorism. To their credit, they’re hardly at the emo-terror-levels of its role-model — Upworthy. But even their website tagline is consistent with the tactic: “Trending…
This is a political satire/humor site for “The Citizen,” a.k.a. BJ Schwartz; however, it has a serious side. Those more serious posts are under the banner of “The Serious Citizen,” but they are op-ed pieces and shouldn’t be believed whole-heartedly as factual, rather, one’s opinion. From the About page: [. . . BJ] harkens back to his college days doing…
Consider Death & Taxes more as one big pisstake. It’s primarily a op-ed site, and much of their content is pretty enjoyable to read and safe to reshare. They, too, tend to fall for the occasional misconstruance*, like the Nazi Salute of the Anti-Gay Alternative to the Boy Scout story, which they later updated with a footnote (in smaller font…
The Atlanta Banana. It’s fake news, y’all. From their About page: Is any of this real? The Atlanta Banana is a grassroots effort to write serious, hard news. Yeah, real hard. So hard it feels like your jeans are going to rip off. So hard if it walked sideways through the library there’d be a hell of a lot of…
