UPDATE: BuzzFeed didn’t even retract their FAKE news story. They just changed the headline & hoped no one would notice.

ORIGINAL STORY BELOW

A group of online comedians who plotted to fool BuzzFeed into posting a completely fake news story were successful after the “social news and entertainment company” published hoax claims that the group had been denied entry to an all female video game tournament because they were transgender.

“Over the past 2 weeks we set up a plot to see if we could trick Buzzfeed into posting something that is fake, for the laughs,” Sly Buehl Rigilio told Infowars.

And it worked. BuzzFeed fell right into the trap.

“There was a female only tournament hosted by a company known as ESL (Electronic Sports League), for a game called Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. We decided to pose as a “transgendered” pro team, we made it as ridiculous as possible by uploading obvious troll pics to our profiles on the tournament’s website (pics of us wearing wigs, etc). We knew we were going to get declined into joining the tournament, so once we did get turned down, I then sent an email to a Buzzfeed “journalist” by the name of Lane Sainty to try and bait them into making a story out of it,” adds Rigilio.

After bombarding Sainty with the “poor me victim approach,” BuzzFeed “instantly jumped at the chance to write an article about it,” says Rigilio.

BuzzFeed’s story, entitled These Trans Women Were Asked To Show Their Passports To Enter A Female Gaming Tournament, quoted Rigilio at length describing his (completely fake) battle against transgender discrimination.

The article repeated Rigilio’s hoax claim that his transgender team were banned from the tournament because of the photographs they supplied and that he “almost broke down in tears” when he found out. The article also quoted Rigilio as saying some of his team had started “hormone replacement therapy”.

Ironically, the Electronic Sports League rejected Rigilio’s fake transgender team “in order to prevent trolls,” a possibility that BuzzFeed failed to consider before it published the fake news story.

ESL’s director of communications, Anna Rozwandowicz, even told BuzzFeed that “there had been multiple incidents of male players trying to enter female tournaments as a joke,” but BuzzFeed failed to realize that that’s exactly the stunt Rigilio was pulling before publishing the fake story.

All BuzzFeed had to do was Google search “Rigatoni Family,” to discover that the outfit was a troll group with conservative sympathies and that the story was likely to be totally bogus, but they failed to perform this basic due diligence.

“We did nothing to hide our team name, which was “Rigatoni Family” and if you were to search that name into Google, you’d find our channel and website where we clearly are shit disturbers. It’s blatant negligence on the behalf of Buzzfeed and other news orgs that have since picked up the story, aka Fake News,” Rigilio tells Infowars.

The Rigatoni Family has a goofy website and a satirical YouTube channel that includes a video making fun of HIllary Clinton voters, but BuzzFeed failed to check any of this before publishing the fake news story.

Rigilio forwarded Infowars emails confirming that Sainty ran the story past BuzzFeed editors before the go-ahead was given to publish the article.

“If you come across more incidents like this, I would love to hear about them,” Sainty told Rigilio in her final email.

Yeah, probably best to do a little more research next time, BuzzFeed.

The fake story even set off a debate amongst BuzzFeed’s SJW readers as to whether or not the transgender players should be allowed to compete with biological females because, as one commenter put it, “Women need safe spaces, and misogyny is rife in the gaming community.”

This is a reference to the “GamerGate” controversy, during which many gamers complained that leftists were inserting their political correctness agenda into video game design, sacrificing quality in favor of virtue-signaling and feminist tokenism.

Kotaku, a video game website that has been accused of pandering to social justice warriors in the past, also reported on the fake news story and quoted Rigilio complaining of the abuse he received from the Electronic Sports League. Mashable also published an article about the fake story.

Having been completely trolled, Electronic Sports League announced that it would be “working with diversity-focused partner organization AnyKey to revise the rules” of its tournament.

The whole farce underscores how the left’s insistence that gender is fluid and can be anything the individual decides on a whim only leads to confusion and a complete lack of proper discernment. Throughout both articles, Rigilio is referred to as “she” despite the fact that he is definitely a he.

Rigilio says the whole episode emphasizes “how hard it is to take Buzzfeed and other bad news organizations serious.” Indeed, it’s interesting to note how BuzzFeed jumped at the story without any proper vetting simply because it correlated with their hysterical social justice narrative.

Of course, this is not the first time that BuzzFeed has published completely fake news. They infamously released the Donald Trump ‘pissgate’ dossier which has been vehemently debunked.

BuzzFeed, which last week was forced to respond to the scandal of their employees joking about the assassination of President Trump, previously attacked Infowars for publishing fake news (we were similarly tricked by another individual into publishing a bogus story).

The fact that BuzzFeed News, which likes to think of itself as part of the mainstream media and decries Infowars as having zero credibility, fell for the same exact stunt, is particularly ironic.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.

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