Hoax new story 'fools'(?) Drudge Report

see the story in the very bottom left corner? It was a sister story that spread around generic hysterical moronic right-wing websites and talk radio all weekend.

"Muslims Shout 'Praise Allah!' Following Press Conference"

So of course me finding the headline completely bullshit on it's face I had to go watch the press conference for myself here http://www.wsj.com/video/oklahoma-beheading-police-hold-press-conference/F4BF3310-B075-4DC3-80DC-C81A8A281F8F.html

nobody yells anything during it

On drudge they linked to the original source for the story, an independently ran conservative website called

The Gateway Pundit



when you click on the actual story you see immediately what the supposed 'source' was



A guy named Bob Lawson who allegedly goes by the twitter handle @LandonLawson78

That Twitter account no longer exists, but using Google cache you can see that its a) a brand new account and b) only has 17 followers

suspicious on its face, but not 'proof' that its a fake or sock puppet twitter account, of course whoever was running this account wanted to throw in convincing tweets to show it was just some regular joe-6-pack construction worker



Oddly no one called out this person as being fake or making up the story, but his account was inexplicably shut down within hours of the story going viral through ring wing media. The Twitter account was doing a great job of riling people up though



the next step was to find out if the picture was of a real person or if a Bob Lawson lived in Oklahoma and existed anywhere else online

with a quick reverse image lookup it became obvious this was a sock puppet/fake twitter account to begin with.



interestingly only one conservative outlet I could find ran a retraction, but they mentioned nothing about the obvious fake nature of the 'source' and originally ran with it as well.

Breit Bart only confirms the story is false by asking the police, even though from 10 minutes of google sleuthing you could have found pretty convincing evidence it was fake from the very beginning. Apparently the hysteria about muslim terrorism is more important than fact checking.

this has been your daily installment of Watmm politics

edit: I put 'fools' in quotes since Drudge does this kind of shit all the time, but this is the first time I've caught it while it was still on the front page. Within 4 hours of me posting all this info online, Drudge finally removed the story

discussing this on chatmm right now.

as an agnostic, i think islam is primitive crap. but i also realize that trying to stir up tensions between the general american population and islam will only result in misdirected aggression towards anyone that looks like they could be muslim (i.e., brown people). the people writing and spreading these false articles don't realize the dangerous game they're playing.

going off a similar point, there are plenty of *real* things involving muslims you could fear monger people about, it's just fascinating to me that people resort to spreading false stories. It is a very dangerous game. Part of me sees the type of coverage Vice is doing on ISIS right now as pretty damaging too, did anyone watch Shane Smith interview the ISIS dude? The mere fact that he's taking this honestly teenage looking kid so seriously as a jihadi makes absolutely no sense. If Shane Smith had any balls he would have told the guy 'who the fuck are you? you look like a kid, why should any of be afraid of your rhetoric?'

in the video the kid says that they are planning many martyrdom operations in New York City and he just sits back and lets him say all this truly unbelievable exaggerated shit.

vice has totally sold out. they'll have a decent special once in a blue moon, but then they "report" about celebrity crap. it's clear to me they just want that ad revenue $$.

I'm only really talking about their coverage of ISIS and I started to notice it alot when the Sochi olympics started. Some of their political content very closely mirrors the US State dept official line

Excellent post. Anyone who sees these stories should be immediately suspicious as you were.