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This married gay couple runs one of the largest alt-right fake news sites

This married gay couple runs one of the largest alt-right fake news sites

Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Sinclair Treadway aren’t your typical gay couple.

The couple first made news when they were one of the first gay couples to get married in Britain and photos of their happy moment were splashed worldwide. Now they’re creating “news” out of whole cloth via their alt-right fake news site Your News Wire.

Their site has become the go-to rightwing conspiracy theory site and according to the Hollywood Reporter, they’re starting to rival Breitbart.

Adl-Tabatabai, a British citizen, and Treadway, a Bernie Sanders supporter in the 2016 election, traffic in conspiracy theories and outrageous stories based off a small detail in a news story that they blow out of proportion. They’ve published stories on Pizzagate, medical hoaxes, sky trumpets, and helped push Donna Brazile out of her job at CNN during the election.

Disaffected liberals, the two seem to believe the media is responsible for all of humanity’s woes. While they’ve criticized some of Donald Trump’s policies (like the transgender military ban), they view him as a transformative presence in American politics.

“He may be a buffoon, and he may make some really bad mistakes during his presidency, but he’s still an anti-establishment figure,” Adl-Tabatabai said. “A vote for him was a vote to smash the system.”

After being regularly debunked by fact-checking website Snopes and repeatedly called out as liars in British media, the site has finally lost its Google AdSense account, cutting into the couple’s revenue by 60%. The site has fought back by publishing “defamatory slurs” resulting in cease-and-desist letters according to Snopes‘ David Mikkelson.

The site’s Pizzagate and Ariana Grande bombing conspiracy theories are heavily trafficked thanks to Facebook and other social media platforms. Facebook, one of the largest proliferators of fake news during the election, recently announced a crackdown on the made-up stories using, you guessed it, Snopes as fact-checkers.

The couple admit they have a working relationship with the other large conspiracy theory and nutjob politics website InfoWars. And like that site’s founder, Alex Jones, they’ve managed to twist the crackdown on fake news into something it patently isn’t – a win for them.

“We’re all now questioning reality as it’s being handed down, how it’s interpreted, how it’s portrayed,” Adl-Tabatabai told the Hollywood Reporter. “The audience itself is already questioning the facts.”

Editor’s note: This article has been edited to remove an incorrect statement about Andrew Breitbart’s sexual orientation. We regret the error.

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