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On 13 June 2017, the web site United News published an article claiming that a young man in Calgary had cut off his penis after attaching razor blades to a toy called a fidget spinner: This is not a real news story. United News purports to be a genuine news site (in fact, their About Us page declares that their mission is to delivery [sic] high-quality journalism), but there are several ways to tell that this story is fake. For one, the article lacks specific details, such as the name of the name of the man involved in the incident or the hospital where he received treatment. We also searched for reports about the incident in Canadian publications such as The Calgary Herald, the CBC, and CTV, but found no mention of a man cutting off his penis with a fidget spinner adorned with blades. This isn't the first fake news story to be generated in the wake of the fidget spinner craze. Other outlets have falsely claimed that one of these toys became lodged in a woman's vagina, that they were altering the earth's gravity, and that they caused a schoolteacher to lose an eye.
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