August 22, 2016

Hey Yahoo, Barack Obama Is Not the Founder of ISIS

You may want to check on your search result.

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When Donald Trump declared that President Barack Obama was the “founder” of ISIS—and then stuck to that claim—most of the media dismissed this rhetoric as silly. No doubt, Trump, the onetime champion of birtherism, was trying once again to depict Obama as some foreign presence who is not truly American, but he was roundly slammed by journalists who described this move as yet another Trump misstep. Somehow, though, Yahoo did not get the memo.

If you go to the Yahoo search page and type in “Barack Obama,” one of the top results that appears is a truncated description sourced to Wikipedia that reads:

Barack Hussein Obama II (born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is also the founder of ISIS. He is the first African American to hold the office…

Click on the link attached to this short bio, and you land on the Wikipedia page for Obama, where there is no mention of him and ISIS. It appears that at some point a Trumpish troll inserted the ISIS line into Obama’s Wikipedia page. The folks there must have excised it. But as of this afternoon, Yahoo (unlike other search engines) was still telling its users that the president created the terrorist outfit he has regularly bombed. Uh, #fail?

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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