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Hoaxes Tag

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on October 19, 2017 19 Comments
2017, a most ridiculous time to be alive. Wednesday, internet sleuths thought they were really on to something -- the "Melania Trump" standing next to the president was not in fact Melania, they claimed. Dressed in a trench coat and sporting a fab pair of sunglasses, someone whose TV has jacked up aspect ratio decided the difference in appearance was substantial enough to suggest the first lady had a body double.

Posted by Mary Chastain on June 28, 2017 6 Comments
Social media took off late Tuesday night after video caught a helicopter circling Venezuelan government buildings, including the Supreme Court. Reports indicate that the helicopter "fired 15 shots at the Interior Ministry, where scores of people were at a social event, and dropped four grenades on the court, where judges were meeting." President Nicolas Maduro immediately slammed the attack, which he called a coup attempt. But other theories have come to light with the opposition saying Maduro staged the coup attempt as a way to crackdown on his opponents and grab more power.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 10, 2017 23 Comments
You may recall our extensive and widely-cite coverage of The Great Oberlin College Racism Hoax of 2013:
A massive racism hoax took place at Oberlin College in February 2013 in which two students made seemingly racist, anti-Semitic and other such posters, graffiti and emails for the purpose of getting a reaction on campus, not because they believed the hostile messages.  At least one of the two was an Obama supporter with strong progressive, anti-racist politics. School officials and local police knew the identity of the culprits, who were responsible for most if not all of such incidents on campus, yet remained silent as the campus reacted as if the incidents were real.  National media attention focused on campus racism at Oberlin for weeks without knowing it was a hoax.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on December 23, 2016 7 Comments
As if faith in establishment media wasn't depleted enough, there seems no end to stories recently exposed as hoaxes. In fact, just about every story where someone was supposedly the victim of pro-Trump hate has turned out to be nothing more than wish casting. We're keeping track of this particular strain of media malpractice. Not surprisingly, most of the hoaxes took place on college campuses. This is what we have so far:

1. Muslim student’s claim that Trump supporters attacked her was HOAX

A Muslim woman who attends Baruch College recently claimed that three drunken men attacked her on the subway and pulled at her headscarf while yelling “Trump.”

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 21, 2016 26 Comments
Adam Saleh is a YouTube personality with over a million followers. Today, he claimed he was removed from a Delta Airlines flight for speaking Arabic. Saleh has a history of creating hoaxes, many of them in order to portray Muslims as victims of discrimination. The facts are still coming in, but it's appearing that this at best was a deliberate over-reaction by Saleh for the camera, or at worst an outright hoax he created from the start as he has done before. Either way, Saleh achieved another round of viral video fame, and his video on Twitter has been shared several hundred thousand times.

Posted by Mike LaChance on December 15, 2016 19 Comments
A Muslim woman who attends Baruch College recently claimed that three drunken men attacked her on the subway and pulled at her headscarf while yelling "Trump." Now she has been arrested after admitting she made the whole thing up. The New York Daily News reports:
Muslim college student who claimed Trump supporters attacked her on the subway under arrest for making story up She made it all up — and now she’s under arrest. The Muslim college student who claimed she was harassed on the subway by three men who shouted “Donald Trump,” called her a terrorist and tried to rip her hijab off her head has admitted to detectives that she concocted the entire story, the Daily News has learned.

Posted by Mary Chastain on October 05, 2016 14 Comments
On Wednesday, Romanian hacker known as Guccifer announced he hacked into the Clinton Foundation. He showed a screenshot of folders he found in the foundation's server, which included "docs and donors lists of the Democratic committees, PACs, etc." He then asks if this surprises anyone, but it did raise a few red flags. It turns out, people have discovered that a lot of his new "findings" actually belong to a previous hack on the Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). Plus, Clinton Foundation officials said no one could find proof that someone hacked its server.

Posted by Mary Chastain on May 18, 2016 18 Comments
The courts in Johnson County in Iowa have decided not to charge a University of Iowa student for lying about a hate crime committed against him. Johnson County Attorney Janet Lyness said:
"If we were going to charge him, we could charge a variety of other people with disorderly conduct or different things (concerning this incident). And it seemed more important to the community to get the information out on what had happened."

Posted by Mike LaChance on May 08, 2016 7 Comments
Last week we covered the story of three students at the University at Albany who were facing charges for staging a race hoax. The school has now expelled two of the students and suspended another. FOX News reports:
Two New York college students who claimed to be victims of racist attack expelled Two black female college students who claimed to be victims of an assault by a group of white men and women reportedly were expelled from the University at Albany. University at Albany President Robert J. Jones said in an email to The Albany Times Union Thursday that Ariel Agudio and Asha Burwell were dismissed from the college. A third student, Alexis Briggs, was suspended for two years.
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