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In the chaotic aftermath of the 12 June 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting, a number of rumors and inaccuracies swept across social media. Among them was the claim that a new syndicate including the Atlanta Sun Times (not the Chicago Sun-Times) had reported news of the massacre several hours too early: The item went on to claim that Google had also displayed the timestamp: As the post indicated, Google automatically populates information from web sites, so it holds that if Atlanta Sun Times incorrectly dated the page, Google would also display that incorrect information. We checked the source code of the page and indeed, the item was listed as published several hours prior to the attack — in one portion of the code: However, that wasn't universally true. While the aggregation of the Atlanta Sun Times' report was incorrectly timestamped, the original content was clearly not: The mismatch in timestamps suggested a technical error of some sort, so we contacted the Atlanta Sun Times to ask whether the variation was a glitch or something else. An employee explained to us how the aggregated article (since corrected) ended up misdated: The Orlando shooting was not the first time Superstation95 used a major tragedy to sow additional fear and confusion (which then turn into lucrative pageviews for the site's owner). Superstation95 is a web site that is neither a superstation nor a legitimate news source, but rather a dumping grounds of misinformation from Hal Turner, a white supremacist who spent 33 months in prison for making death threats against three federal judges in 2009. (The name listed on the site's Contact page is Turner's lawyer.) Beginning in late 2015, Superstation95 began spreading alarmist hoaxes and conspiracy theories on social media, often building upon legitimate tragic or frightening events with embellished (and frightening) details. Among the most widely spread were claims that a large group of Muslim men fired upon campers and hikers in California, Fukushima radiation caused severe mutations in marine life, cargo ships mysteriously ground to a halt signaling imminent economic catastrophe, a deadly Las Vegas strip car crash involved a driver shouting Allahu Akbar, the San Bernardino shooting occurred because the shooter was offended by pork served at a holiday party shortly before the massacre, the Earth's magnetosphere collapsed for two hours, and a (nonexistent) suicide note left by a genuinely deceased ICE agent warned of impending FEMA camps and mass enslavement. None of Superstation95's tragedy-milking predictions have ever come to fruition.
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