We Tracked Down A Fake-News Creator In The Suburbs. Here's What We Learned

A lot of fake and misleading news stories were shared across social media during the 2016 election. One that got a lot of traffic had this headline: "FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide." The story is completely false, but it was shared on Facebook over half a million times. We wondered who was behind that story and why it was written. It appeared on a site that had the look and feel of a local newspaper. Denverguardian.com even had the local weather. But it had only one news story — the fake one. We tried to look up who owned it.

Eventually we found our man: Jestin Coler. Coler's company, Disinfomedia, owns many faux news sites — he won't say how many. But he says his is one of the biggest fake-news businesses out there, which makes him a sort of godfather of the industry. Below are highlights of NPR's interview with Coler.