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Mokillo is more colorfully known as finger-tip rot, and can be a problem for banana growers. We learned this story was a variation of other fake stories of disease-ridden fruit, and this one sprung from a Facebook user posting photos of a malady called mokillo. The story tries to cast doubt on this by noting researchers were puzzled by the banana-borne infections. 6, 2017, that carried the headline, "HIV virus detected in Walmart bananas after 10 year old boy contracts the virus." (The website was recently taken down, but there's an archived version of the story here.)įor the record, HIV can’t survive outside the human body, so it’s not possible for the virus to live in a fruit like a banana. One such site,, not only used a web address similar to CNN, but its graphics also deliberately looked almost the same. But most imposters we’ve found so far have set up shop anonymously through domain services like. We did see that some sites were based in far-flung global locations like Macedonia and Chile. Like many other fake news sites, it’s very difficult to see who owns them, thanks to private registrations. These sites attempt to trick readers into thinking they are newspapers or radio or television stations.
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The website ran this fake story about children being infected with HIV by tainted bananas.Īdding to the fog of fake news online, several websites appear to try to confuse readers into thinking they are the online outlets of traditional or mainstream media sources. That is especially true in the case of our next couple of categories. We can look up the owner of any website, but if the buyer has used a proxy service of some kind to buy the domain, there are precious few details about the true owner, or even from which country the site is operated. is registered in Thessaloniki, Greece, but most of the sister sites belong to an address in Jerusalem.īeing able to identify Sompo as the administrator is an exception, because learning who owns and operates these websites can be exasperatingly difficult. These are all registered to an administrator named Eli Sompo, who told us he creates sites for clients, but wouldn’t give us much more information than that. Similar urls share reports like this one, including websites like, , and. It is part of an entire family of similar websites under the umbrella. (Palin was not too pleased about the parody.) Only the first paragraph about the mall hiring an African-American Santa Claus is real. The site calls itself a "hybrid news/satire platform," taking real news hooks and building fake stories on top of them.Įvery article has a "show facts" button to illuminate which parts of the story are real and those that are fabricated.
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If you look closely enough, admits it makes things up. The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate never said these things. This story referred to a factual development: Minnesota’s Mall of America hiring its first black Santa Claus.īut then it quoted Palin as saying people should run the Mall of America "into the ground," on the basis of Santa "always having been white in the Bible," and, "No, I refuse to believe that they went this far in trying to cater to the minorities, I thought the company had some backbone but I guess I was wrong." 3, 2016, article on a website called carried the headline, "Sarah Palin Calls To Boycott Mall Of America Because ‘Santa Was Always White In The Bible.’" 9, 2017, and is no longer updated.)įor example, a Dec. We want to help readers sort out fact from fiction on your social news feeds, so we compiled a list of every website on which we’ve found deliberately false or fake news stories since we started working along with Facebook - to 330 in all. Using our experiences, we've been able to create our own fake news almanac. It’s also difficult to determine where these fictional stories come from, and just how they spread across the Internet. We’ve noted some trends along the way, chief among them that it can be really difficult for readers - from casual skimmers to seasoned newshounds - to spot fake news outlets when they pop up. As of April 19, we’ve written more than 80 fact-checks about fake news stories. Since December, we at PolitiFact have been partnering with Facebook to root out fabricated reports shared by social media users. And it’s not always apparent to readers that’s the case. Even has an official ring to it.īut all of these websites peddle bogus stories, either by making up fake news or sharing it from other sources. At first look, certainly seems a trustworthy source.