Just under 40,000 people live there, but it welcomes an estimated 3 million tourists a year. Steve Arrison thought his job was about get a lot easier.Īrrison is CEO of the Hot Springs Convention & Visitors Bureau for the town of Hot Springs, Arkansas. This is the story of one of the world’s largest and most unique fake news empires, and how it gave birth to what became the iconic hoax of the 2016 election. To try and identify the owner, BuzzFeed News followed a trail from the fake sites to a group of now-defunct websites about topics including nurses and photos of Jennifer Love Hewitt, and eventually to a house in the small city of Atascadero, California, where a man named Justin Smithson resides. Not surprisingly, the person behind one of the biggest fake news scams of all time prefers to remain hidden. None of the sites list an owner or company, and all of their domain registration records are private. Many of the fake stories identified by BuzzFeed News followed the exact same pattern: They falsely reported that a big celebrity was moving to a specific town or community. But a BuzzFeed News investigation has found that the site is part of one of the world’s most unique and ambitious fake news operations - a network of at least 43 websites that together have published more than 750 fake news articles. It has largely been overlooked as a player in the world of fake news, a flash in the ersatz pan. WTOE 5 News is no longer online, and its owner has never been identified. Yet little has been said - and is known - about the site that originated this massive fake news hit. That hoax has been pointed to again and again. That post has earned close to 1 million Facebook engagements and was the single biggest fake news hit of the election, according to a previous analysis by BuzzFeed News.Įnding the Fed’s copycat hoax has gone on to capture additional attention as concerns about fake news during the election have intensified. But the hoax did even better on Facebook when, in late September, the website Ending the Fed published a fake story with the exact same headline. To date, the hoax has registered over 100,000 comments, shares, and reactions on Facebook, according to data from BuzzSumo. The story also falsely declared that “news outlets around the world” were reporting the endorsement. It improbably quoted the pope as saying that the FBI’s inability to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her emails led him to endorse Trump. was barely two weeks old when it published the hoax story, “ Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President, Releases Statement.” In early July, a website made to look like a real news organization published what would prove to be one of the biggest fake news hits of the US election.
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