“Trump wins the award Obama never could.”

A website affiliated with a self-described liberal troll who tries to dupe people on Facebook into clicking on his made-up stories is peddling a bogus claim that President Donald Trump was awarded the title of International Man of the Year.

“Trump wins the award Obama never could,” stated a March 9 headline on the website Ladies of Liberty, which claims to be a satire website.

Don’t worry about finding out which award he won. This story is a hoax.

Facebook users flagged the post as being potentially fabricated, as part of the social network’s efforts to combat online hoaxes. Ladies of Liberty describes itself as “a whimsical playland of conservative satire” and says that everything on the website is fiction. It’s affiliated with Christopher Blair, a man whose websites are among the biggest sources of hoaxes online.

The story said that Trump was awarded the title of “International Man of the Year” by the ICMSA. Click on the link for the acronym, and it shows that it stands for “International Committee for Meaningless and Superficial Awards.”

Blair operates a number of websites that churn out misinformation, sometimes under the banner of satire, sometimes not. He shares his stories in Facebook groups and tries to get them to spread virally. “I discovered that Facebook following plus blog plus ads equals income,” Blair told us in 2017. Blair’s stories are often copied by other online blogs, and he has reported them for copyright violations, according to BuzzFeed. 

Back to the statement. A website claimed “Trump wins the award Obama never could.”

The story is made up. We rate it Pants on Fire!