The US-based myth-busting website Snopes is facing bankruptcy as it is deluged with personal injury lawsuits by followers of Donald Trump.
A spokesperson for Snopes said the company would defend the actions but still risked a huge legal bill that could see the site shut down.
Snopes has gained popularity and notoriety for its work in researching and analysing claims circulating largely through social media to determine if they are true, false, if they have some element of fact, or if they are urban myths or deliberately misleading.
“Our problem started a few weeks ago when we decided we simply could not keep pace with the claims being made by Donald Trump at his many rallies or during the many interviews or speeches he is delivering in his campaign to become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee and regain the White House,” the spokesperson said.
“It can take some time before our Snopes website can be updated to include our assessments of Trump’s claims at any particular event and by then he has invariably already flown to another state where he has made more claims at another event.
“We decided we needed to speed up the process so we decided last week not to keep posting online our verdicts on the truth or otherwise of Trump’s claims. Instead we hired several professional town criers from the UK. (main picture)
“It’s their job to attend every event where Donald Trump speaks and to ring their bells whenever they hear him tell a lie or make a baseless claim.
“Unfortunately, this has sparked numerous personal injury lawsuits from those attending Trump rallies who have complained about hearing loss allegedly caused by the constant bell-ringing by our town criers for pretty much the entire duration of any Trump speech.
“Just from one rally during the week we receive a couple of hundred claims amounting to several millions of dollars.
“We want to continue delivering the service we provide, but we’ll have to go back to the drawing board on this one,” the spokesperson said.
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