Paul Horner

Paul Horner (November 5, 1978 – September 18, 2017) was an American writer, comedian and contributor to fake news websites whose stories have been said to have had a significant impact on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Horner was lead writer of the website National Report since the site's launch.

One of his widest-spread fake stories was a piece claiming artist Banksy had been arrested and his identity revealed as Paul Horner, which Horner posted in 2013 and was re-circulated in 2014 and once again in 2017.

Horner is still listed as a possible suspect behind Banksy's true identity and some even believe Banksy could be Horner's creation who goes by the name Fappy The Anti-Masturbation Dolphin; a Christian mascot with over 100,000 followers on Facebook and was supposedly doing a documentary by Michael Moore along with being arrested for public masturbation five times. Random art sightings claiming to be works of art by Banksy stating, "Paul Horner I come for you", turned out to be hoaxes by Horner.

Due to one of Horner's stories, former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer had to go on live television to insist that she was not implementing mandatory gay to straight programs in all Arizona K-12 schools.Fox News did a live broadcast about one of Horner's stories as being factual: Barack Obama had personally funded a Muslim museum so it could stay open during the government shutdown of 2013.

A stir was caused across the Internet as St. George, Utah was the focus of an article posted on National Report claiming the city had made pornography illegal with first-time offenders receiving 30 days in jail.

Horner left National Report in 2014, launched News Examiner at the start of 2015 and also started numerous websites including cnn.com.de, cbsnews.com.co and nbc.com.co to post fake news articles, as well as ABCnews.com.co. In 2015 he wrote a fake story that Yelp was suing South Park that received wide circulation, as did another story that a man named "Paul Horner" had undergone the world's first head transplant.

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