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tagHome Entertainment Europe Happening Now Hoax Alert Politics Satire Tech Trendolizer Picks Video Just Because It’s Trending Doesn’t Mean It’s True Analysis Aftermath: TheBL.com’s ’Fake’ Survivors Get New Faces, Duties As Foreign Net Tries To Rise From The Ashes Of Facebook Purge Editor’s Note by Lead Stories Editor-in-Chief Alan Duke: Three days after a virtual apocalypse wiped out hundreds of fake people used to run a foreign pro-Trump network on Facebook, we... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsTheBL Editor Reacts As Facebook Takes Down Foreign ’Fake People’ Network, Admits ’We Spent Lots Of Money On Trump’ Just days after Lead Stories revealed hundreds of "fake faces" used to mask a Vietnamese-based network of Facebook profiles and groups promoting political content on American timelines, those "people who... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsFake Faces: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook To Influence 2020 Elections (Part 1) EDITORS NOTE: Meet Carolina Chaney. Take a good look at her Facebook profile photo. Maybe she looks like your kid’s math teacher or your doctor. Privacy settings block us... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsClint Eastwood Death Hoax Tech Eerily Reminiscent of 2017 Rowan Atkinson Death Hoax Earlier this week Lead Stories already reported that Clint Eastwood was NOT dead, despite what a YouTube video was claiming: Fake News: Clint Eastwood is NOT Dead | Lead Stories... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsThat Fake ’Drunk Pelosi’ Video Was A Dud: How Lead Stories And Facebook Defused A Viral Bomb A viral video that was digitally altered to make it appear that U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was slurring her words and drunk has raised questions about what social platforms... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsPress Release: Happy Fact-Checking Day! #factcheckingday Lead Stories is happy to support Fact-Checking Day 2019! ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (April 2, 2019) - In most of the world, April 1 is a day for fools. April 2is... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsMalinformation, Misinformation, Disinformation: Lead Stories NOT Using The Term F*ke N*ws Anymore Update: Yes, of course this was an April Fools joke :-) For years we here at Lead Stories have put the term "F*ke N*ws" in every headline but it is... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsPress Release: The International Fact-Checking Network launches FactCheckEU, its European fact-checking project Hoaxes know no borders, especially in Europe. That’s why the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) is proud to announce the launch of FactCheckEU, a collaborative effort from 19 European fact-checking outlets... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsOn The Difference Between Fake News and SatireWhy Lead Stories Needed A Satire Policy Things used to be very simple and clear-cut here at Lead Stories. We used our Trendolizer engine to look for things that were trending online that were not true (but... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsChristopher Blair Launches New Snopes & DeadState Parody Sites It appears the feud between Snopes and self-described internet troll Christopher Blair keeps on going: earlier this week he took to Facebook to announce a new parody website that explicitly... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsLead Stories Joins Facebook’s Third Party Fact Checking Partnership COLORADO SPRINGS - Lead Stories is happy to announce we are now part of Facebook’s partnership with various fact checking organisations around the world which aims to fight misinformation on... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsKumanovo-connection Update: Macedonian Fake News Purveyor Revealed To Be Military Intelligence Major One of the Macedonians identified by Nieuwscheckers and Lead Stories to be behind a network of sites publishing hate-mongering fake news turns out to be a major in the military... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsMacedonian Fake News Network Shuts Down Dozens Of Websites After Joint Investigation By Lead Stories & Nieuwscheckers Back in November of 2018 fact checking sites Lead Stories and Nieuwscheckers collaborated to map a network of Macedonian fake news websites that had published thousands and thousands of articles... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsHow A Tattoo Led Us To The Macedonian Trucker Delivering Loads of Fake News To The Internet The joint investigation by Lead Stories and Nieuwscheckers into a network of Macedonian fake news sites reached a dead end last month: we knew most of the sites involved and... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsThe Kumanovo-connection: Macedonian Spam Clans Still Make Money With Fake News About Muslims and Migrants A Macedonian military man appears to be one of the driving forces behind a network of fake news websites that reached millions of people with articles often inciting hatred against... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsHere Are The Tools And Methods We Used To Map A Macedonian Fake News Network And The People Behind It Sherlock Holmes had his magnifying glass. Hercule Poirot relied on his "little grey cells". But the 21st century internet detective needs more than that to catch the bad guys. In... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsDecline and Fall Of A Macedonian Fake News Network: Numbers Indicate Facebook’s Measures Forced Desperate Move To Twitter Although Macedonian fake news merchants still generate thousands of Facebook likes and shares, the platform’s recent measures against bad actors have drastically reduced their reach. The next step in the... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsLead Stories Fastest At Debunking 2018 Top Hoaxes Identified By BuzzFeed News A few days ago BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman published his annual overview of the top 50 biggest on-line hoaxes of the previous year. Just like last year we used this list... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsFake News: James Woods Hit By Death Hoax, First Victim of New Christopher Blair Site Did actor and conservative commentator James Woods pass away? No, that’s not true: his obituary was published by a new liberal satire website run by Christopher Blair on which he... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsOld Network of Anti-Islam Fake News Websites Turns To Twitter Trolling Tara, Jesica, Ana, Lora: since a few weeks dozens of trolls on Twitter are dangling bait in front of American Trump supporters. Their goal: bring in as many clicks as... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsThe Ultimate Christopher Blair and America’s Last Line of Defense Reading List Yesterday Eli Saslow at the Washington Post wrote a fantastic article about Christopher Blair, a man from Maine who has been trolling conservatives and Trump supporters online for years and... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsFake News Website YourNewsWire Renamed NewsPunch (Again)Possibly To Avoid Filters YourNewsWire used to be one of the most notorious websites spreading fake news, often by using bits and pieces of real news articles from other websites to create new articles... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsBBC Interviews Christopher Blair And Maarten Schenk in "The Faker and The Fact Checker" Recently the BBC World Service’s "Trending" programme did a two part story about Christopher Blair, the liberal troll and internet hoaxer well known to anybody who has been following Lead... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100 commentsSatirical Fake News Writer Christopher Blair Announces Midterm Election Moratorium Readers of this site are probably aware that some of the content found on Macedonian fake news websites is often copied directly from the satirical sites and Facebook pages of... [ Read the full story ] 360 shares 100...