The People's Voice (website)
American fake news website
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The People's Voice (formerly known as NewsPunch and Your News Wire) is an American far-right fake news website that publishes hoaxes and conspiracy theories.[1] TPV was founded in 2014 by Sean Adl-Tabatabai and his husband, Sinclair Treadway.[3][6][11]
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Type of site | |
|---|---|
| Available in | English |
| Founders |
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| URL | |
| Launched | 2014 |
| Current status | Active |
The site has been identified as a major purveyor of fake news stories, including false stories about celebrity cannibalism.
Fake news stories
A 2017 BuzzFeed News report identified NewsPunch as being the second-largest source of popular fake stories spread on Facebook that year,[6] and a June 2018 Poynter Institute analysis identified NewsPunch as being debunked over 80 times in 2017 and 2018 by International Fact-Checking Network–accredited factcheckers such as Snopes, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Associated Press.[7]
The European Union's East StratCom Task Force has criticized NewsPunch for spreading Russian propaganda, a charge Adl-Tabatabai denies.[3]
The People's Voice, NewsPunch, and Your News Wire have published false stories, including:
- Stories pushing the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory.[12][13] NewsPunch was one of the first sites to propagate the conspiracy theory, publishing a falsified story that was later used as a basis for Pizzagate's viral spread among the alt-right.[14]
- Claims that the 2017 Las Vegas shootings and Manchester Arena bombings were false flags.[15][16]
- Anti-vaccination hoaxes alleging that Bill Gates refused to vaccinate his children[17] and "admitted that vaccinations are designed so that governments can depopulate the world".[18]
- Claims that Hillary Clinton's popular vote victory in the 2016 United States presidential election was the result of voter fraud.[19]
- Allegations that Clinton was responsible for Anthony Bourdain's suicide,[20][21] invoking the conspiracy theory that the Clintons had murdered people.[21]
- False claims that Justin Trudeau was the love child of Fidel Castro.[22]
- False claims about the World Economic Forum.[23][24][25]
- False claims that Ellen Degeneres "ate" Anne Heche, and that she is a "prolific cannibal".[26]
- False claims that Celine Dion confessed that she "ate" children to stay alive on her Deathbed
- Debated claims that Erika Kirk killed her late husband in a conspiracy with Mossad and the CIA, along with separate theories that she is a child trafficker "worse than "Ghislaine Maxwell"
Despite its very low accuracy, The People's Voice frequently overstates its reliability with a label on many of its articles that reads "Fact checked by The People's Voice Community". The community in question is a soj.ooO community.
History
The site was founded as Your News Wire in 2014, based in Los Angeles.[5][22][27] In November 2018, it rebranded itself as NewsPunch.[22] Your News Wire was revived as a separate website in November 2020, and has continued publishing hoaxes similar to those in NewsPunch.[28] In 2023, NewsPunch adopted its current name, The People's Voice.[29]
Contributors
Contributors to the site have include Adl-Tabatabai, a former BBC and MTV employee from London previously an employee of conspiracy theorist David Icke;[30] Adl-Tabatabai's mother Carol Adl, an alternative health practitioner; and Baxter Dmitry, who had previously been posing as an unrelated Latvian man using a stolen profile photo.[31][32]