A horror film set up five fake news sites and started publishing untrue stories as part of its marketing strategy.
A Cure for Wellness, which is due for release this weekend, established plausible-sounding news outlets, which ran weeks’ worth of fabricated stories.
The topics covered included Donald Trump, abortion and Islam – topics known to attract large readerships online.
Among the more typical false stories were some specifically designed to promote the movie.
As detailed by the Lead Stories debunking site, the hoax stories were scattered with references to locations, characters and organizations in the film.
They also interpolated the phrase “sickness within” – a marketing tagline for the film – into the text of stories.
Rather more obviously, the sites also ran a lot of ads for A Cure for Wellness – and even posted a story – archived by BuzzFeed– about the film having such a profound effect on one viewer that he was left in a “catatonic state”.
Some of the stories were picked up by other news sites, including one alleging that Lady Gaga was planning on inserting “a tribute to Muslims” into her Super Bowl half-time show, and another claiming that Donald Trump had denied federal funding to help Californians evacuated by the trouble at the Oroville dam.
The network of sites were given names implying they were trusted local news outlets: Sacramento Dispatch, Salt Lake City Guardian, Houston Leader, NY Morning Post, and Indianapolis Gazette.
When it started to be widely reported that the sites were a hoax, they were all shut down and replaced with redirect links to the movie’s official site.
A spokesman said: “A Cure for Wellness is a movie about a ‘fake’ cure that makes people sicker.
“As part of this campaign, a ‘fake’ wellness site healthandwellness.co was created and we partnered with a fake news creator to publish fake news.”
