Satire: Trapeze Artist With Diarrhea Did NOT Shit on 23 People (UPDATED)

Fact Check

  • by: Maarten Schenk

STORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Satire: Trapeze Artist With Diarrhea Did NOT Shit on 23 People (UPDATED)

Did a trapeze artist with diarrhea shit on 23 people in Boston? No, that's not true: the story was made up by the English language version of a Spanish humor website that used to disguise itself as a news source. They have now added the phrase "Not real, but so funny" to their logo and added following warning at the end of the article: "The content of There Is News is fiction, as you can read in our Legal Warning".

The story appeareed in an article published on March 4, 2019 titled "Trapeze artist with diarrhea shits on 23 people" (archived here) which opened:

"The wonderful Belgian Circus has arrived, full of magic, illusion, laughter, show, fun, with tamers and our brave trapeze artists" was the presentation of the circus, this Friday, in the city of Boston.

Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:

Trapeze artist with diarrhea shits on 23 people

"The wonderful Belgian Circus has arrived, full of magic, illusion, laughter, show, fun, with tamers and our brave trapeze artists" was the presentation of the circus, this Friday, in the city of Boston. What was not expected by the audience, children, adults and old people, is that in the middle of the show, and

However the exact same events with the exact same circus are also said to have taken place in Valencia in Spain two days earlier:

Trapecista con diarrea caga sobre 23 espectadores del circo

"El maravilloso mundo del Circo Belgica ha llegado, lleno de magia, ilusión, risas, espectáculo, diversión, con domadores y nuestros valientes trapecistas" era la presentación del espectáculo circense momentos antes del comienzo este pasado viernes en la ciudad de Valencia.

Shipping an entire circus from Spain to America in two days? Not likely.

The site There Is News carries a link to "Legal Warging" (archived here) in the footer that reads:

Legal Warging

The site "There is news" (https://thereisnews.com) (hereinafter referred to as TIN) is a humor site whose purpose is entertainment.

The content of TIN is fiction and does not correspond to reality.

All references, names, brands or institutions that appear on the site are used as contextual elements, as in any novel or fiction account.

However this link is unreachable on the normal desktop version of the site because of an infinite supply of ads that keep appearing when users scroll down. The site has since fixed this problem by adding a warning directly below each article.

The site is the English language version of the Spanish satire site Hay Noticia, which is owned by Spanish humor website/collective La Fabrica de la Comedia S.C.

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

Updates:

  • 2019-03-06T08:47:39Z 2019-03-06T08:47:39Z
    The site has made changes to make it clear to casual visitors it is publishing fictional content. This article has been updated to reflect that.

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  Maarten Schenk

Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident 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.  He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral.

Read more about or contact Maarten Schenk

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