The People's Voice (website)
The People's Voice is an American fake news website based in Los Angeles. The site was founded as Your News Wire in 2014 by Sean Adl-Tabatabai and his husband, Sinclair Treadway. In November 2018, it rebranded itself as NewsPunch. Your News Wire was revived as a separate website in November 2020, and has continued publishing hoaxes similar to those in NewsPunch. In 2023, NewsPunch adopted its current name, The People's Voice.
A 2017 BuzzFeed News report identified NewsPunch as being the second-largest source of popular fake stories spread on Facebook that year, and a June 2018 Poynter Institute analysis identified NewsPunch as being debunked over 80 times in 2017 and 2018 by International Fact-Checking Network–accredited factcheckers such as Snopes, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Associated Press.
The European Union's East StratCom Task Force has criticized NewsPunch for spreading Russian propaganda, a charge Adl-Tabatabai denies.
Regular contributors to NewsPunch include Adl-Tabatabai, a former BBC and MTV employee from London previously an employee of conspiracy theorist David Icke, Adl-Tabatabai's mother Carol Adl, an alternative health practitioner, and Baxter Dmitry, who had previously been posing as an unrelated Latvian man using a stolen profile photo.
The name The People's Voice was also used by a short-lived internet TV station in the 2010s, which was founded by Icke.
Fake news stories
The People's Voice, NewsPunch, and Your News Wire have published false stories, including:- Stories pushing the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory. NewsPunch was one of the first sites to propagate the conspiracy theory, publishing a falsified story that was later used as a basis for Pizzagate's viral spread among the alt-right.
- Claims that the 2017 2017 [Las Vegas shooting|Las Vegas shootings] and Manchester Arena bombings were false flags.
- Anti-vaccination hoaxes alleging that Bill Gates refused to vaccinate his children and "admitted that vaccinations are designed so that governments can depopulate the world".
- Claims that Hillary Clinton's popular vote victory in the 2016 United States presidential election was the result of voter fraud.
- Allegations that Clinton was responsible for Anthony Bourdain's suicide, invoking the conspiracy theory that Clinton [body count conspiracy theory|the Clintons had murdered people].
- False claims that Justin Trudeau was the Justin Trudeau [Fidel Castro conspiracy theory|love child] of Fidel Castro.
- False claims about the World Economic Forum.