That dramatic story about a transgender person may be a hoax

Trans story from North Carolina may be hoax.

(Image credit: Sara D. Davis/Getty Images)

published 19 May 2016

No, a transgender woman in Georgia wasn't murdered while exiting a women's restroom. No, a transgender woman wasn't caught taking creepshots of girls in a Dallas bathroom. And no, Target isn't installing urinals in the ladies room.

All three of these stories have been reported and shared as fact in recent days as controversy around North Carolina's "bathroom law" continues to swirl — and all are hoaxes. In the case of the murder story, for example, the original article was posted on a fake news site, "Associated Media Coverage," and described a store which is not real while quoting people who don't exist.

Though Facebook in particular has attempted to limit credulous sharing of fake news, many sites are convincingly designed to have the look of a legitimate outlet. And the bathroom law debate has proved to be a valuable source of clickbait for these sites: It "really hit a nerve with evangelicals and Conservatives making it a ripe topic for ridicule," a pseudonymous manager of multiple fake news sites told Buzzfeed News, and that makes it "good business for those in the hoax and/or satire industry."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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