An online news publisher who profits from distributing fake news says a new Facebook alert algorithm is hurting his business.

Paul Horner, who owns more than a dozen fake news domains, last month posted a false story that reported that President Trump signed an executive order allowing the hunting of bald eagles. In the aftermath of Facebook users flagging the story as possibly false, fact-checking organizations like Factcheck.org and Snopes.com checked it out and found it to be false.

The new Facebook algorithm adds an alert to stories that have been debunked by at least two fact-checking organizations. For the purposes of demonstration, the author of this article copied the link to the false bald eagle story and pasted it into a Facebook status update, to demonstrate what now happens:

When we tried to post the article to Facebook, this happened:

Then, after clicking the “post anyway” button …

The alert remained for anyone viewing the post to see. (The author of this article deleted the fake news post from his Facebook page after the screenshots were captured.)

Horner has been interviewed by numerous news organizations about his profitable fake news enterprise, and his comments were featured in the new book, “Fixing Post-Truth Politics:”

On December 12, 2016, Horner posted a story with the headline, “Obama Signs Executive Order Declaring Investigation Into Election Results; Revote Planned For Dec. 19^th.” The Washington Post reported that the story had received more than 250,000 shares on Facebook. The website URL was abcnews.com.co – strikingly like ABC News’s abcnews.com. The extreme similarity may have caused people to think after a quick glance that they were looking at an actual ABC News report. (By February 2017, Facebook had blocked people from sharing content from this URL “because it includes content that other people on Facebook have reported as abusive.”)

During a February 2017 check of the “revote” story, the ABCNews.com.co website had the following “bio” of the “reporter” who wrote the story below the article:

 

Jimmy Rustling, ABC News

Born at an early age, Jimmy Rustling has found solace and comfort knowing that his humble actions have made this multiverse a better place for every man, woman and child ever known to exist. Dr. Jimmy Rustling has won many awards for excellence in writing including fourteen Peabody awards and a handful of Pulitzer Prizes. When Jimmies are not being Rustled the kind Dr. enjoys being an amazing husband to his beautiful, soulmate; Anastasia, a Russian mail order bride of almost 2 months. Dr. Rustling also spends 12-15 hours each day teaching their adopted 8-year-old Syrian refugee daughter how to read and write.

 

There is no attempt here to hide the fact that there is non-factual information on the page. When asked by the Post about how his “business” is different than it was a few years ago, Horner said, “Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Horner’s U.S.-based fake news sites generate revenue by displaying Google AdSense ads. Website owners can add blocks of code provided by Google to their websites, and ads served by Google will display in the spots on the site where the code is placed. Google is the middleman. Advertisers pay Google to distribute their ads to websites around the country and the world through this method.

However, Horner’s tune has changed in the wake of the Facebook algorithm change, according to USAToday:

“There’s definitely been a huge change, a dramatic change,” Horner told USA TODAY by phone last month. “It’s hurt my wallet for sure with how difficult it is now to get something to go viral and people so quick to call things fake news.” … “If people know the article might not be true then they’re less likely to read it or if they think it’s a gag or a joke they read it as that and then they don’t share it,” said Horner, who lures readers to his websites with a salacious headline then pockets ad revenue from the page views.

Business is tougher now for everyone else too. Several fake news sites have shuttered in the past six months or stopped publishing stories entirely. Jestin Coler, who was named the “king” of fake news by NPR, has “retired” from the business and took the widely popular NationalReport.net and the Denver Guardian with him. In total, 28 fake news sites have shut down in the months following the election, according to BuzzFeed News.

This appears to be very good news for Americans who are tired of the proliferation of fake news.