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This is what happens when liberal trolls, fake news, and Macedonians collide.
Here's what happened.
On Jan. 23, TheRepublicanNews.net published a completely false story claiming Trump ordered staff to remove Obama’s “Islamic symbols” from the White House. It quickly generated close to 700,000 shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook, according to BuzzSumo.
The story falsely claimed that in Obama's White House “silence has been ordered during the 5 times of Islamic prayer each day. In addition, prayer rugs and crescent moon symbols are available in several areas of the executive mansion to make Muslims more comfortable.”
None of the above is true, and the story has been debunked by Snopes and others.
Reached by phone in London, the owner of the site, Ike Offor, told BuzzFeed News he runs the site part time and that he's trained as a clinical scientist. He said he believes the story to be true.
“Some people consider it fake news and all that,” he said. “But the point is that we got some sources about a few things — of course we cannot prove everything, that’s the thing about news.”
The Republican News / Via therepublicannews.net
The thing about this particular piece of fake news is that it originally appeared online Dec. 4 on a site called The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense. In fact, Offor’s site copied the text word for word.
Offor said he was not familiar with this earlier version of the story. He also said he saw the Snopes debunking but that his “sources” for the information were different.
The Resistance: The Last Line of Defense / Via thelastlineofdefense.org
The hoax was soon picked up by other websites — and those versions of the hoax also did well on Facebook. The Oriental Times, a site based in Nigeria, got more than 50,000 engagements for its copy of it. USADailyInfo.com generated more than 45,000 engagements for its story.
BuzzFeed News identified 30 websites that copied the hoax and presented it as true within three days of it being published by Offor's site.
Several of those sites are based in Nigeria, which is where Offor was born. (His site began in 2015 with a focus on news about Nigeria and other countries in Africa.)
Along with Nigerian sites, the hoax was picked up by pro-Trump sites with connections to Macedonia. BuzzFeed News previously reported on a cluster of more than 100 websites based in Macedonia that often publish fake news.
IncredibleUSANews.com, which is connected via its IP address to an owner in Macedonia, received close to 20,000 engagements for its story.
BuzzFeed News
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