Fake news sites are simply changing their domain name to get around Facebook fact-checkers

Facebook has been cracking down on the fake news that gets shared on its platform. One problem: one of the biggest fake news websites has found a workaround.

In order to avoid Facebook’s fact checking system, the site formerly known as YourNewsWire, one of the most well-known purveyors of fake news online, has simply rebranded. The site now goes by News Punch and posts fake news content similar to what it published under their former name, according to a report by Poynter.

YourNewsWire co-founders Sinclair Treadway and Sean Adl-Tabatabai, who reside in California, founded the site in 2014. The two completely migrated the website from the “yournewswire.com” domain name to “newspunch.com” in November 2018. Treadway told Bloomberg at the time that they move was made due to declining revenue thanks to Facebook’s fact-checking system. Under this program, fact-checking outlets like Snopes are able to mark content posted on Facebook as false, which in turn decreases the site’s reach on Facebook.

According to the investigation, the workaround has been a success. Content that Poynter itself had found to be previously marked false on “yournewswire.com” was ported over to the “newspunch.com” domain. When shared on Facebook, that same fake news content that now lived on “newspunch.com” was not marked as false under the fact-checking program.

A recent fake news story published by News Punch about Bill Gates’ doctor saying he didn’t vaccinate his own kids received more than 600 engagements on Facebook, according to social media monitoring service CrowdTangle. A YourNewsWire fake news story prior to the domain swap once received as much as 740,000 engagements on the social network.

Facebook is aware of the domain swapping issue and has started to roll out features to deal with the workaround, the company told Poynter. The company has recently ramped up its efforts to deal with the growing fake news problem on its platform.

While looking into this story, Mashable discovered that Adl-Tabatabai had put the website up for sale in October 2018 on the website marketplace platform, Flippa. The sale page lists the website as YourNewsWire but offered up the News Punch domain as part of the package. The listing also divulges interesting traffic and revenue stats about the site.

For example, the listing reports that the fake news website received as much as 10 million pageviews and nearly 7 million uniques in October 2017. Almost two years later, the site received around 800,000 pageviews and less than 400,000 uniques.

The fake news website’s revenue decline is even more dramatic. The listing reports that YourNewsWire made more than $33,000 in the month of October 2017 alone. In September 2018, the site reportedly made $3,051. According to the Flippa sale page, the operating cost of the site has remained $3,000 throughout the reported months.

Adl-Tabatabai notes that the “yournewswire.com” domain is now being redirected to “newspunch.com” but lists the reason for the reband as related to Google’s Adsense program.

The listing also includes its own little bit of fake news.

“As of August 2018, traffic is down from the average due to a highly contentious political season before the Midterm elections,” says the YourNewsWire sale page, making no mention of it’s fake news related Facebook traffic woes. “We anticipate traffic levels to normalize after this.”

Perhaps News Punch traffic has normalized since the migration, but that’s thanks to a clever Facebook workaround which likely won’t exist for much longer.