Fake news
A viral story about a couple who found out they were twins when they went for IVF treatments seem to be fabricated according to the Mirror UK. The article was published by the ‘Mississippi Herald’ on Thursday and was soon picked up by news and social media outlets around the world. The article claimed a man and a woman found out they were biological twins after a routine DNA test at a fertility clinic.
The story reportedly came from an unnamed doctor who worked at an unnamed clinic in Jackson, Mississippi. However, when online readers couldn’t find any evidence of a called the Mississippi Herald, they grew suspicions of the authenticity of the story.
MirrorOnline which also published the story, says they spoke to the Mississippi Sun-Herald, a daily newspaper based in Biloxi which has been in circulation since 1884. Night editor Kim Anderson said:
“There is not a Mississippi Herald. “Our web editor is aware of this story and the Mississippi Herald appears to be the only source of this news.”
“We’ve certainly never heard of the Mississippi Herald, there’s certainly no bricks and mortar building to my knowledge. “We suspect it’s a fake news story.”
The Mississippi Herald appears to have first started ‘publishing’ news stories last week on April 10. There is no phone number, email address or physical address to contact the ‘newspaper’.
The domain www.mississippiherald.com was only registered on November 2 last year.
An identical story appeared in the ‘Denver Inquirer’ in December 2016, sp that is probably where they got the idea of the story from. #Fakenews.
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