Dreamware / Work / Finding the Fake News King
Finding the Fake News King
Identified the person behind a network of fake news sites that generated 1.6 million views in 10 days, leading to NPR Planet Money Episode 739.
The Challenge
In the weeks before the 2016 US presidential election, a fake news story with the headline "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide" appeared on a site called The Denver Guardian. It spread to hundreds of thousands of Facebook feeds and accumulated 1.6 million views in just 10 days. The Denver Guardian wasn't a real newspaper — but someone was making money from this and dozens of similar fabricated stories.
NPR's Planet Money team wanted to find the person behind the operation. The challenge was tracing a story that had been deliberately designed to obscure its origins — fake publication names, anonymous domain registrations, and a network of shell sites meant to make attribution impossible.
Our Approach
John Jansen did all the data analysis and tracking work to identify the person behind the fake news network. The investigation involved tracing digital breadcrumbs across domain registrations, hosting infrastructure, advertising networks, and social media propagation patterns. Each fake news site was a node in a larger network, and by mapping the connections between domains, ad accounts, hosting providers, and content patterns, John was able to work backwards from the published stories to their common origin.
The methodology combined traditional OSINT techniques with data analysis — cross-referencing WHOIS records, reverse IP lookups, ad network identifiers, and content fingerprinting to build a picture of the operation. The trail led from The Denver Guardian through a web of interconnected sites back to a single operator in the suburbs.
The Outcome
The investigation identified Jestin Coler and his company Disinfomedia as the source of the fake news network. This became NPR Planet Money Episode 739: "Finding the Fake News King" (Episode 739) — one of the most widely shared episodes in the show's history. NPR also published a companion piece: "We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned" (companion article).
The story broke at a pivotal moment in the global conversation about misinformation and social media. It demonstrated that fake news wasn't the work of foreign state actors or sophisticated operations — it was one person in the suburbs with a network of websites and an understanding of how social media algorithms amplify outrage. The investigation contributed to a broader reckoning about platform responsibility and information integrity.
Key result
NPR Planet Money Episode 739, 1.6M views traced
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