F abricated content is that which is 100% false. In the lead up to the 2016 US presidential election, the false claim that Donald Trump had been endorsed by Pope Francis received huge attention. The headline featured on a site called WTOE5 which peddled a number of false rumors in the lead up to the election. An oldie but a goodie, from 2012, is the video of an eagle purportedly stealing a baby in a park. The video received over 40 million views before it emerged that the video had been created as part of a class assignment to create content that might successfully hoax viewers. The students used a computer-generated eagle which was so believable that only a frame-by-frame analysis showed that the eagle’s wing detached from its body for a split second and its shadow later appeared out of nowhere in the background of the footage. Another example of 100% fabricated content is a video which emerged in 2014. It appeared to depict a gun battle in Syria and a boy saving a young girl. Stills from the film ran on the front cover of the New York Post. It transpired that the video was created by filmmakers, shot in Malta, and used the same film set as the Gladiator movie. They wanted to draw attention to the horrors taking place in Syria, but their actions were condemned by human rights activists who argued that this type of fabrication undermined their efforts to document real atrocities. This article claims that Pope Francis endorsed Donald Trump for president, but it isn’t true. The site is no longer online but was debunked by Snopes. Archived September 6 2019.31 52 I N F O R M AT I O N D I S O R D E R FA B R I C AT E D C O N T E N T 53

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