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FAKE NEWS: MIKE CERNOVICH AND HIS ILK 

To the right you will find a screenshot of a fake news video posted to the page of Mike Cernovich, a conservative blogger with over 300,000 followers. The video depicts a crowd of people in England marching in the streets dressed in dark colors and looking to be of middle eastern decent. The video was also shared by popular conservative figurehead Milo Yiannapoulis, and on both pages it racked up a humongous amount of racist and Islamophobic comments. The video in question, however, does not show any demonstration regarding Sharia law but instead shows a yearly religious tradition practiced by Shia Muslims known as "Ashura", a day of mourning. 
 

The video is from the UK, but the false caption was first shared on a US page. This post is an inflammatory honeypot that basically is designed to "confirm" the fears of islamophobic citizens and to spark anti-muslim bias. The post was made in 2016 during the election, and was obviously meant to align with Candidate Trump's anti-muslim rhetoric.

On the bright side, anybody with half an ounce of skepticism could tell this is a fake story fairly quickly. First off, Mike Cernovich is a known inflammatory blogger who regularly posts fake news stories. Secondly, a simple google search would return no such results confirming the story, and shortly after its posting the top hit is a snopes article debunking the claim (https://www.snopes.com/video-muslims-sharia-ashoura/). Thirdly, the title is inflammatory, the comments are disgusting, and there's no link from the video to support the claim. 

I can confidently say that this post would not fool me, because it didn't. I saw this exact post during the election and a simple google search returned no hits. Other suspicion arises from the fact that very few people in the video are holding signs and people appear to be dancing and dressed in religious garb, which makes this appear much less like a protest and more like a parade or religious festival. 

Many of these conservative bloggers exist on the net and they work by amassing a large amount of followers by simple confirmation bias. This is how "professional trolls" like Cernovich and Yiannopoulis come to popularity. 

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