by Jo McCloy
Hey guys,
This is another article about fake news in times of corona and I will focus not just on one article, but rather on a website.
I don´t know if you heard about the website “The Dark Truth” or not, but I´d like to tell you a little more about it. This week it was my turn to write about fake news and to find some I thought would be the easiest way to just search for “coronavirus truth”. These two keywords should lead me to more alternative sources I thought and I wasn’t disappointed.
The first result given was “The truth behind the coronavirus” by The Dark Truth and it sounded promising. Their slogan is “raw, unbiased news”.
Taking a closer look at the website I was a little surprised because I expected something obscure, lurid and dramatic. The website is designed in a clean style: dominant colours are black, white and orange, which are also found in the logo.
You can see a banner which says “breaking news” and added “exclusive”, as well as article suggestions. Each of them show you in the preview the author, the expected time it will take you to read it and the month it was published.
Till here I was a little surprised, but going deeper into the website I found some interesting things.
You can find several categories such as “news”, “science and technology”, “uncategorized” and the category I will dig deeper into is “dark truths”.
First of all the article I originally found was, as I said “The truth about the coronavirus”, already published in January 2020. The author is George Truth.
Yes, that sounds suspicious and not very reliable when you connect the name of the website to the author´s name, but some people have just interesting names, so I started to search for George Truth. As you might already think, I couldn’t find a George Truth, even though I used three different search engines: no LinkedIn profile, nor a Facebook account, nothing.
If you look closer at other articles he wrote you´ll find headlines such as “Fighting the deep state” or “Australian inferno – electromagnetic warfare?” and here something else is striking. All articles are written by George Truth, no other author published on this website, except Stonewall Jackson.
And yes, this name sounds suspicious too. Looking up this one I came across two Stonewall Jacksons: a musician and a confederate general from the American civil war. The confederate states were an unrecognized slave-holding republic from 1861 – 1865. So why would a journalist use this name as a pseudonym?
The musician Stonewall Jackson was an American country singer in the ´50s and ´60s and I couldn’t find a connection between him and the author Stonewall Jackson who wrote articles such as “Bio-weapon mind control lab exposed!” I couldn’t find any professional account or information about an author called Stonewall Jackson.
Going through the website you find sections such as an archive or “About us”.
All articles were published in the last four months and the archive does not contain anything older than February 2020.
When you click on “About us” a short paragraph explains what the purpose of the website his: “uncovering the truth. We seek to investigate every big issue in the world today, including chemtrails, the one world economy, GMOs, vaccines, fluoride in the water, as well as other subjects of interest.”
To me, this sounds not very professional, nor reliable. What underlines the impression that this website is not an objective/independent news channel is the fact that it was created using WordPress and Newsium, both used to easily create blogs or websites for free.
So till now, we found out that this website most likely exists for no longer than four months, none of the authors can be found on the internet and the website is created using free tools and tries to have a serious appearance.
Let´s continue looking around the website and we find a merchandise store, where you can buy anything you think of with the logo of The Dark Truth on it. This sounds more like a brand or a profit maximizing company than media whose goal is to inform people. This website wants to inform and educate people, considering articles with theories about the original reasons for WWI and WWII which are not taught in schools.
Or they want to inform about COVID-19, which turns out to be one of the weirdest theories about corona I´ve read.
I will not analyse the article traditionally, I just want to show you have many opinions exist out there and that most of the people have the resources and options to spread them. This is not necessarily a problem, but I want to emphasize that these conspiracy theories are more popular than we think, most of us consume “normal” media, but people are focusing on an entirely different perception of the world and this is one.
So even though on a first glance this website and article seems to be professional but it´s not what you would call “raw, unbiased news” and without having the real names of the authors and the spread of conspiracy theories such as “child-killing oligarchs of the world using the manufactured scariest virus ever to promote the scariest disease ever.” this website cannot be trusted.
I cannot say anything to that, except that I hope there is no need to explain the problems of this statement.
Thank you for reading my article, I hope you enjoyed and keep in mind: Fake news are not always as obvious as this one here!