ABCnews.com.co

» see abcnews.com.co as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I checked the domain in August 2026 while writing this. abcnews.com.co answers with a permanent redirect to a driving school in Turkey. Plain http and https both land on the same page, an ordinary about-us for an ordinary business teaching ordinary people to drive. Of all the endings available to a site that spent 2016 pretending to be a national American broadcaster, ending up as a Turkish driving school is the one nobody would have written.

The site launched in 2016 and belonged to Paul Horner, who had been running fabricated stories under various names for years before that. The design was the product. He took the ABC News logo and page furniture, and put them behind a domain that read left to right as abcnews.com and then kept going. The.co is Colombia's country code, and.com.co is a second level inside it that anybody could register from anywhere.

That is the entire trick. On a phone or in a screenshot, the tail of a URL is the part nobody reads. The stories did not have to be convincing to a careful reader. They had to survive one glance at a domain by somebody already inclined to believe the headline.

~ the dossier ~

~ what ran there ~

The story that traveled furthest claimed that protesters at Trump rallies had been recruited off Craigslist and paid up to thirty-five hundred dollars each. It was invented. It was also shared by people at the very top of the campaign, and it is still repeated a decade later by people who have never heard of the site it came from.

The rest of the catalog was the same shape: an executive order on assault weapons that Obama never signed, an escape by El Chapo that never happened, Michael Jordan moving the Charlotte Hornets over a bathroom law, a Supreme Court ruling stripping Scientology of its tax exemption. Each one was written to be forwarded rather than read. Horner told the Washington Post he made about ten thousand dollars a month from the advertising against them.

~ the argument he made for it ~

Horner's public defense was that he was satirizing the people who shared his work, and that the real story was how little checking anybody did before hitting the button. He said in interviews that he had expected the fact-checkers to catch up and that the checking never arrived.

It is a bad defense and it also contains something true. The stories worked because the distribution layer had no notion of a source, and a link that looked close enough to a network's domain inherited that network's authority for exactly as long as it took to scroll past. Nothing about that was specific to Horner. He was one person with a domain, and the machinery that carried his work was built by companies with a great deal more money than he had.

~ how it ended ~

Horner was found dead at his mother's house outside Phoenix on 18 September 2017. He was thirty-eight. The medical examiner attributed it to an accidental overdose involving fentanyl.

The site outlived him by a matter of weeks. There was no shutdown notice and no handover, because there was nobody to hand it to. ABCnews.com.co went dark in October 2017 and the registration expired days later, which is what a domain does when the only person who ever renewed it is gone. Several of his other sites went the same way in the same season.

~ the long tail ~

The domain trick did not die with him. Look-alike suffixes are still the cheapest way to borrow a masthead, and the platforms that carried the 2016 stories now strip or annotate links precisely because of the year this site had. Whether that helped is a separate question.

What is left is a redirect to a driving school. Someone picked the name up cheaply after it lapsed, pointed it at a business that has nothing to do with any of this, and inherited whatever residual traffic still arrives from links posted in 2016 by people who thought they were reading the news.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »