Claim:
The Mountain Dew brand soft drink is being discontinued by Pepsico.
In August 2015, a news-like link reporting that the popular soft drink Mountain Dew (owned by Pepsico) was going to be "cancelled" started circulating around social media. Although the link appeared to point to a real news story, it was generated by the trolling web site FeedNewz:
The content on FeedNewz.com was user-created. Anyone with an Internet connection could use the web site, as well as prank.link and fakeshare.com, to create fake news headlines:
When social media users click on links created by one of the above-mentioned web sites, they were redirected to a "You Got Owned" page. FeedNewz.com then encouraged anyone who was fooled by the prank to share it again with their own social media circles, ensuring that the pranks went viral:
