Fake News: Urban Meyer NOT Cleared Of All Charges From Panel (Yet?)

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk
Fake News: Urban Meyer NOT Cleared Of All Charges From Panel (Yet?)

Was Ohio State football coach Urban Meyer cleared of all charges regarding his handling of domestic violence accusations against assistant coach Zac Smith? No, that's not true: the investigation hasn't made it's conclusions public yet but some joker uploaded a fake article to a prank website that said he had been cleared.

The story originated from an article published on the website nsfnews.com on August 19, 2018 titled "Urban Meyer cleared of all charges from panel" (archived here) which read:

As you may know urban Meyer been on paid administrative leave for accusations from former WR coach Zac Smith , Courtney smith Zac smiths former ex wife , in allegations in 2015 for not reporting to urban Meyer domestic violence isssues and other charges pertaining to his personal life , as u all know , they hired a panel of investigators to research all of the evidence and talk to everyone involved in this matter , well Sunday aug 19th was gonna conclude this matter. Aug 18th at 5:43pm the panel has found Urban Meyer Cleared of any involvement in this matter . We will start off 2018 Football season with coach Urban Meyer to bring the Buckeyes to 2018 National Championship .

The site that published the story is a prank website where users can submit their own headline, description and photo to create realistic looking prank news articles.

react365.jpg

Users don't even need to upload their own image, there is a built-in search function that will pull an appropriate image from Google image search.

The site is part of a larger network of prank sites all using the same basic layout but sometimes in different languages. It appears to be run by a Belgian company named Mediavibes or Media Vibes which is managed by a man named Nicolas Gouriou according to registration records.

Each site in the network comes with a disclaimer (sometimes translated into a different language) that reads:

This website is an entertainment website, jokes are created by users. These are humourous jokes, fantasy, fictional, that should not be seriously taken or as a source of information.

So don't fall for this prank now that we've warned you about it!

We wrote about nsfnews.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:

Want to inform others about the accuracy of this story?

See who is sharing it (it might even be your friends...) and leave the link in the comments.:


  Maarten Schenk

Maarten Schenk is the co-founder and COO/CTO of Lead Stories and an expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

About Us

International Fact-Checking Organization Meta Third-Party Fact Checker

Lead Stories is a fact checking website that is always looking for the latest false, misleading, deceptive or inaccurate stories, videos or images going viral on the internet.
Spotted something? Let us know!.

Lead Stories is a:


WhatsApp Tipline

Have a tip or a question? Chat with our friendly robots on WhatsApp!

Add our number +1 (404) 655-4223, follow this link or scan the image below with your phone:

@leadstories

Subscribe to our newsletter

* indicates required

Please select all the ways you would like to hear from Lead Stories LLC:

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. For information about our privacy practices, please visit our website.

We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By clicking below to subscribe, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing. Learn more about Mailchimp's privacy practices here.

Most Read

Most Recent

Share your opinion
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2018/08/fake-news-urban-meyer-cleared-of-all-charges-from-panel.html
leadstories.com
CC-MAIN-2024-38
103805
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:NC363EEKHQQMAXGW4JYLBNGUDJQ5K4VD
<urn:uuid:f1e0741e-6f3e-4efd-8d18-549c971819b1>
2024-09-18T04:56:57Z
172.67.28.131
text/html
sha1:2U6JBZCMSNXZ2TOFSSA2GGVMU5RI75GI
<urn:uuid:7acd6e89-59fd-4141-a0b3-7977c886301d>
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2018/08/fake-news-urban-meyer-cleared-of-all-charges-from-panel.html
response
<urn:uuid:2b5f1e7e-ab9c-4247-b789-0a4a2d68406b>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2024-38
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2024
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-15
software: Apache Nutch 1.20 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.5-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/