Jonathan McElvy didn't expect his small weekly paper in Houston to attract so much negative attention during Super Bowl Week. But in the days before the big game, he was inundated with angry phone calls and emails from around the country and even across the ocean.



A rabbi from London wrote to chastise McElvy for how his paper, The Leader, was "mis-reporting on a serious topic with serious health implications for many of your vegan readers."

Vegan readers? In Houston? McElvy was puzzled. A woman from New York rang him up to give him heck too.

A link shared on his paper's Facebook page provided a clue as to what was going on. The story was from a website called HoustonLeader.com and had the headline, "Thirty Year Study Of Vegans Finds Increased Rates Of Mental Health Issues." That same site published other totally fake stories, such as that Lady Gaga planned a tribute to Muslims during the Super Bowl halftime. People who came across the hoaxes and recognized them as fake went looking for the owner of the site — and ended up contacting the wrong Leader.

As revealed by BuzzFeed News, HoustonLeader.com was one of five fake local news websites that published fake news articles as part of a publicity campaign for A Cure for Wellness, a Hollywood thriller opening this weekend. The sites inserted the film's hashtag into some stories and overtly mentioned the film in others. But they also pumped out unrelated hoaxes about vaccines, Trump, and other topics that did not mention A Cure for Wellness. Over the course of a few weeks, the articles generated tens of thousands of shares, reactions, and comments on Facebook, fooling many people in the process.

"We’re a free weekly paper that’s been around for 64 years, and we got absolutely killed by the fake news sites that were created to promote the film," McElvy told BuzzFeed News.