Slay News’ Frank Bergman isn’t a real person. We investigate who’s running misinformation site
Summary
The website Slay News is a prolific publisher of inaccurate and misleading information on topics ranging from health to climate to politics. Although the website claims to be based in the U.S., it is in fact registered in the United Kingdom. A Science Feedback investigation shows that Slay News has associations with Paul Roughsedge, a web designer who co-founded UK-based IT consultancy One Fox Digital with Stephen McQueen [Editor’s note: This sentence was updated to reflect new information provided to us post-publication]. The same company also operated Neon Nettle, another website known for publishing false information and conspiracy theories.
Our investigation also sheds light on other anonymously-run websites linked to Slay News, bringing to light a hidden network of websites and social media accounts that appears to have been, to the best of our knowledge, unrecognized until now.
Table of Contents
- Frank Bergman of Slay News
- Slay News: “unapologetically pro-America”
- Advertising tracking codes establish links to other websites
- Robots.txt and sitemap lead to hidden email address
- Paul Roughsedge and One Fox Digital Ltd.
- Stephen Anthony McQueen
- Conclusion
If you’ve come across social media posts claiming that…
…the Cleveland Clinic warned “millions” of COVID-vaccinated people will die in five years…
…the World Economic Forum demanded a ban on homegrown food…
…U.S. federal agencies “admit” to spraying chemtrails…
Then you’ve likely come across articles written by someone named Frank Bergman, a writer affiliated with a website named Slay News.
For the record, none of the above claims are true (see debunks here, here, and here). But they are just a few examples of the “news” that Slay News publishes. It distributes its articles to a wider audience through its Facebook page and X account (@slay_news_). In February 2025, the website received nearly 600,000 visits according to SimilarWeb, with roughly 80% from the U.S.
The sensational nature of Slay News headlines encourage reposts and shares by social media users, facilitating the spread of the website’s content. A link search on the Meta Content Library—a repository of public posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads—showed that in March 2025, some Facebook posts sharing Slay News misinformation about health attracted tens of thousands of user engagements (likes, reactions, comments, and shares).
One article from February 2025, which falsely claimed that COVID-19 vaccines caused a surge in heart failure in Japan, was even shared on X by Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times. Soon-Shiong’s post cast doubt over COVID-19 vaccine safety, receiving more than 140,000 views. A Science Feedback review examined the claim in the article and found that it misrepresented a study in Japan. (More reviews of Slay News’ claims from Science Feedback here.)
Frank Bergman of Slay News
Who is Bergman? According to his profile on Slay News, he’s “a political/economic journalist living on the east coast”. He also allegedly “conducts interviews with researchers and material experts and investigates influential individuals and organizations in the sociopolitical world”.
Bergman is the most prolific writer for Slay News, having published nearly 7,000 posts on the website at the time of this report’s publication. But he’s not the only writer for the website; we found several author profiles on Slay News: David Hawkins, Nick R. Hamilton, and David Lindfield.
A reverse image search using each author’s profile photo didn’t produce any exact matches apart from the one present on Slay News’ website. A search for those names didn’t turn up any individuals who matched those profile photos.
These findings in themselves aren’t necessarily suspicious. But a red flag emerges when one runs a simple test to check if a person’s face has likely been generated by AI. This post on X observed that the profile photos of Slay News’ writers are likely synthetic, generated by AI-powered tools like thispersondoesnnotexist.com. We replicated the same test performed in the X post and confirmed its result.
Instances of synthetic faces being used to lend credence to misinformation have been documented by many, including the Digital Forensic Research Lab and Lead Stories. These findings of inauthenticity, along with Slay News’ record of publishing inaccurate or misleading claims and conspiracy theories, led us to try to uncover the website’s true origins.
Slay News: “unapologetically pro-America”
Slay News describes itself as “unapologetically pro-America and pro-free speech” and even provides a U.S. address as its base of operation, leaving users with the impression that the website is based in the U.S. But this is belied by the website Whois which shows that the domain registrant is located in East Sussex, Britain.
This discrepancy raises questions, as does the website’s lack of transparency surrounding its ownership and its sources of funding. The presence of ads on the website does suggest that it’s at least partially funded by ad revenue.
Previous investigations by ProPublica and NewsGuard have shown that the monetization of mis- and disinformation through advertising is big business. Therefore, we surmise that one possible motivating factor for Slay News’ activities is the prospect of financial gain: viral misinformation engenders increased web traffic, which in turn increases the number of users who are shown ads, ultimately leading to greater ad revenue for the website publisher.
Advertising tracking codes establish links to other similar websites
Our hypothesis led us to examine advertising tracking codes used by Slay News, as this could lead us to other affiliated websites that might provide further leads for investigation. This is because publishers tend to use the same advertising codes across their websites.
In this way, advertising tracking codes can be useful in illuminating relationships between different websites belonging to the same publisher. Tracking codes can be obtained using various tools, such as Well-Known, DNSLytics, and if one is familiar with the format of such codes, through the source code of a webpage, which is viewable using a browser’s developer tools.
Using Well-Known, we found that two advertising codes used by Slay News (Google AdSense pub-3539938573156268, MGID 683414) were also used by the domains evol.news, newsaddicts.com, and raptornews.com.
Whois records show that evol.news was registered in December 2021, newsaddicts.com in May 2023, and raptornews.com in June 2024. DNSLytics shows that the domain raptornews.com redirects users to newsaddicts.com.
Of the three websites, the design of evol.news stands out because of its visual parallels with Slay News. But unlike Slay News, it appears to be a type of news aggregator rather than a publisher of news, listing links to various websites, including News Addicts and another named Newswize. Both News Addicts and Newswize, like Slay News, publish articles offering favorable coverage to conservative politicians, as well as articles containing health misinformation and conspiracy theories.
We found an X account (with the handle @newswize) associated with the Newswize website. Interestingly, this account shares the same user ID as an older Twitter account using the handle @ucorio, which, as this archive shows, belonged to someone who was allegedly Slay News’ social media manager. This is possible since Twitter/X permits users to change their handle. But we can determine whether a current X account is actually an earlier X/Twitter account by looking at the account’s user ID, which cannot be changed.
Taking all of these findings together, we can thus conclude that the websites evol.news, newsaddicts.com, and newswize.com are very likely operated by the same group or individual behind Slay News. The connection between these websites isn’t disclosed, suggesting that the group or individual responsible has an interest in making these websites appear independent of each other.
Robots.txt and sitemap lead to hidden email address
We were able to uncover a hidden network of misinformation websites, of which Slay News is one, by studying advertising tracking codes. But we still weren’t able to find information regarding the individuals operating the website. This led us to take a look at the website architecture of Slay News in the hopes of finding more leads. A handy tool for this is Well-Known, which provides information on the resources that a website uses to build its pages.
For example, Well-Known archives the robots.txt file of websites. This file, also known as the robots exclusion standard, tells web crawlers used by search engines like Google about which URLs on a site shouldn’t be crawled. This function makes robots.txt a good place to look for hidden information about a website.
Through Slay News’ robots.txt file, we located the sitemap of Slay News. A sitemap provides search engines with an organized way to locate information about the contents of a website. While this sounds fairly mundane, a sitemap can also allow us to find content on the website that isn’t publicly accessible on the website itself.
This was the case when we examined the file https://slaynews.com/poll-sitemap.xml, which contained 2 URLs. Based on their last modified dates, these pages were created fairly soon after the website was registered and haven’t been updated since. These pages are most likely related to a poll that Slay News runs, which asks readers who they think is the best U.S. president (with the options Trump, Biden, and Obama), and which is located at the end of each article on Slay News.
The page slaynews.com/polls cannot be accessed through the website, but we were able to reach it through the sitemap. Here we found an email address embedded in lines of code. The email address appears to be located in the part of the code that allows the individual running the poll to be notified when a reader submits a response to the poll.
Paul Roughsedge and One Fox Digital Ltd.
Searching for the name in the email led us to a LinkedIn profile for a web designer named Paul Roughsedge. Roughsedge’s experience as a web designer points to know-how of website construction, which made him a person of interest in our investigation. Interestingly, his location was marked as Greater Brighton and Hove Area. This aligns with the location of Slay News’ domain registrant, as Brighton and Hove are part of the East Sussex county in England.
The profile also showed that Roughsedge previously owned a business selling leather jackets, named Leather Monkeys, and was managing director of Ruf Creative Ltd.
A brief search on Google showed that there is a Paul David Roughsedge who appears in the UK’s Companies House register of companies as someone holding or having held several appointments in a few companies. Among these are Leather Monkeys and Ruf Creative Ltd. Both companies have since been dissolved; nevertheless this information allowed us to confirm that the register records pertained to the same individual we’d identified on LinkedIn.
This information also allowed us to establish that the same Roughsedge is a director for One Fox Digital Ltd., a London-based IT company founded in 2016 that created the website Neon Nettle. For context, Neon Nettle gained a reputation as a source of false information and conspiracy theories, documented by fact-checking groups like PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and Snopes.
Roughsedge’s connection with Neon Nettle was also acknowledged on Neon Nettle’s About page (archive), where he was named as one of the website’s owners and founders. Another individual named Stephen Anthony McQueen, also listed as a director for One Fox Digital on Companies House, was also named as Neon Nettle’s owner and founder.
Science Feedback reached out to Slay News regarding the presence of Roughsedge’s email address on its website and questions about Neon Nettle, but its representative, going by the name of Frank Bergman, didn’t respond to our questions.
We also reached out to the owner of the email address that we’d found on the page slaynews.com/polls for confirmation. The owner turned out to be the same Paul Roughsedge who’s listed as a director of One Fox Digital Ltd. In his reply to us, he denied having anything to do with Slay News, but acknowledged that he’d built several websites for One Fox Digital Ltd., including Neon Nettle. He also claimed he “[didn’t] have anything to do with the company otherwise” and “[hadn’t] spoken to [McQueen] in several years”.
Shortly after we reached out to Roughsedge and Slay News, the page containing the email address was made inaccessible.
After our report was published, a reader brought to our attention a DMCA complaint (in simple terms, a complaint for copyright infringement) made by a company named Evil Corp Ltd. on behalf of Slay News. Records on the Companies House website list a company named Evil Corp Ltd.; Roughsedge is named as its director.
Although Roughsedge claimed to only have been responsible for building websites for One Fox Digital, his social media posts suggest that he was more involved in the company than he let on.
For example, Roughsedge left a comment on Quora promoting Neon Nettle as “an independent alternative to the mainstream media” that offered “a fearless approach to journalism”.
Archives of Roughsedge’s X/Twitter posts also show he regularly retweeted content from Neon Nettle. Another post shows that he’d contacted Health Feedback regarding a fact-check rating issued through Meta’s third-party fact-checking program. On at least two occasions in 2020, Roughsedge complained to Facebook about “a spam block” being placed on Neon Nettle.
Furthermore, Roughsedge also posted links to a website named Coin Thud (cointhud.com), which publishes articles about cryptocurrency. An archive of Coin Thud’s Contact page confirms that the website was operated by Roughsedge and McQueen, just like Neon Nettle, strongly suggesting that One Fox Digital was also behind its operation. Coin Thud’s Whois indicated that the domain registrant was located in East Sussex, like Slay News.
In brief, our findings indicate that Roughsedge didn’t only build websites for One Fox Digital, as he’d claimed; he was also actively promoting content from Neon Nettle and other websites, as well as ironing out issues encountered by social media accounts affiliated with these websites.
Another website we linked to One Fox Digital is News Thud (newsthud.com), based on retweets by Neon Nettle’s Twitter account. Another hint is how the link “Trending News” on News Thud’s navigation bar (at the top of the page) goes to Neon Nettle, while the same “Trending News” link on Neon Nettle’s navigation bar goes to News Thud. This becomes evident when hovering one’s mouse pointer over a link, which typically makes web browsers display the URL of the link at the bottom of the browser window.
All three websites—Neon Nettle, Coin Thud, and News Thud—now appear to be defunct.
Neon Nettle, which appeared to be the most successful of the three in terms of its reach, appeared to stop producing new content sometime in 2022, according to Media Bias/Fact Check. This is supported by an archive from October 2022, which showed that the newest articles on Neon Nettle were dated July 2022. Archives show that the website continued to be accessible until as late as December 2023. It is only in January 2024 that archives began to display a “404 page not found” error, suggesting that this is roughly the time when the website ceased to exist.
Neon Nettle’s Twitter account, like the website, appears to have disappeared. But it actually continues to exist, albeit under a different name.
As we explained earlier, Twitter/X permits users to change their handle. Many users change handles for innocuous reasons, but the option to do so also allows malicious actors to hide an account’s origin and history, making a fresh start, as it were. This also has the advantage of enabling the group to retain the sizable audience that they’d already accrued from Neon Nettle’s activities, as opposed to creating a completely new account.
But we can determine what the current handle of an old account is by plugging the user ID into the Twitter Intents URL: https://twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=[user ID].
We were able to extract Neon Nettle’s user ID (1911303422) by examining the source code of an archive of Neon Nettle’s Twitter profile, which is publicly accessible by using a web browser’s developer tools.
Using the Intents URL, we found that the Neon Nettle account now goes by the handle @DailyFetched. Its bio contains a link to The Daily Fetched’s website; Whois shows that the domain was created in June 2022 by someone with a London address. The Daily Fetched publishes articles similar in tone and style to Slay News.
Apart from the X account, we also located the Facebook page for The Daily Fetched. The page transparency feature shows a history of name changes, connecting Neon Nettle, Coin Thud, and The Daily Fetched.
Stephen Anthony McQueen
Having examined Roughsedge’s social media posts, we turned our attention to looking for online traces of McQueen, Roughsedge’s co-director at One Fox Digital, and found a X account which appeared to be owned by McQueen.
Created in November 2022, the account used the handle @NeonNettle (not to be confused with the earlier Neon Nettle Twitter account discussed above). A reverse image search of the profile picture didn’t turn up any results for identical matches.
Its bio claimed that McQueen is part of the group operating Slay News. A tweet from the same account also stated that Slay News was set up in order to circumvent fact-checkers and networks “screwing with NeonNettle.com”.
Intriguingly, Slay News’ X account disputes this version of events. In response to a tweet by @NeonNettle that they had “moved [their] reporting to @Slay_News_”, Slay News claimed that “This ‘Neon Nettle’ scam account has nothing to do with Slay News. It was maliciously set up by the leftists who run an anti-conservative hoax blog called ‘The People’s Voice’”.
The timing of the reply also raised questions: the tweet by @NeonNettle, which tagged Slay News (and so should have generated a notification), was published in March 2024, but Slay News didn’t contest its claim until January 2025, more than six months later.
And lastly, it’s unclear why Slay News attributed the @NeonNettle account to “The People’s Voice”, the name of an infamous Los Angeles-based website known to publish false information and conspiracy theories, run by former television producer Sean Adl-Tabatabai. It’s unknown what The People’s Voice would stand to gain if this were the case, given that the Neon Nettle account doesn’t appear to post actively and instead directs traffic to Slay News.
We reached out to Roughsedge and Slay News regarding the @NeonNettle account. Roughsedge denied knowing anything about the account; Slay News didn’t respond to our question.
Shortly after we reached out to both parties, the @NeonNettle account was suspended by X.
We were unable to confirm that the account was indeed owned by McQueen, and it’s possible that the account’s claimed association to Slay News is simply an attempt to profit from the latter’s virality.
We’d initially hypothesized that One Fox Digital was possibly linked to Slay News—taking together Roughsedge’s email address on Slay News’ website, the Twitter account @NeonNettle, and the fact that One Fox Digital had previously been involved in operating the misinformation and conspiracy website Neon Nettle.
But after our report was published, McQueen made contact with Science Feedback. He forwarded a notarized affidavit, distancing himself from the @NeonNettle Twitter account, which he stated had “falsely associated [his] name and image with the ownership and operation of slaynews.com”. He also denied any involvement with Slay News and any connection between One Fox Digital and Slay News, evol.news, News Addicts, Newswize, and Raptor News.
He did not, however, count the websites Neon Nettle and The Daily Fetched among them. In an email exchange, he confirmed to Science Feedback that he owns The Daily Fetched and its associated social media accounts, although these aren’t operated through One Fox Digital. The Daily Fetched is another anonymous website that has published inaccurate and misleading information (see relevant debunks here and here).
In summary, the new information provided to us by McQueen rules him out as the owner of the @NeonNettle Twitter account. Therefore, questions remain as to who the real owner of the account was and what their motives were.
Conclusion
Slay News is a website that has published or promoted harmful misinformation and conspiracy theories, occasionally achieving virality on social media.
Our investigation showed that the person or group operating Slay News is also likely behind other similar websites—namely raptornews.com, newswize.com, and evol.news—as evidenced by shared advertising codes and commonalities in domain registrant information. There are possibly other websites associated with the same person or group that we haven’t identified.
Despite the websites’ focus on U.S. current affairs and politics, all signs indicate that the group responsible is based in the UK. Some of these websites, including Slay News, pose as U.S.-based websites, likely in a bid to enhance their credibility and appeal to a U.S. audience.
The person or group responsible has created multiple domains and social media accounts (in some cases repurposing old ones), but avoid disclosing these online assets’ relationship to each other. This has the effect of leaving Internet users with the false impression that these websites are independent sources, when in fact, they work together to push narratives manufactured by the same person or group.
Some of our findings initially suggested that these websites may be connected to a London-based IT consultancy named One Fox Digital Ltd. This is consistent with the company’s history of operating Neon Nettle, a formerly active website known for publishing misinformation and conspiracy theories that had operated for several years before ceasing to exist in 2023.
However, new information provided to us by McQueen, after our report was published, contradicts this hypothesis, suggesting that a different company, possibly Evil Corp Ltd. which is also linked to Roughsedge, is involved in operating Slay News, evol.news, News Addicts, and Newswize. That said, we managed to confirm that The Daily Fetched—another anonymous website that publishes misinformation—is indeed operated by McQueen, although not through One Fox Digital.
We hope our findings here will help inform users and put them on their guard when they encounter content from these websites or their social media accounts. We have summarized the list of domains and associated social media accounts (where available) in a table below for easy reference. Given the propensity for repurposing Twitter/X accounts, we’ve also provided each account’s user ID to better study the accounts’ activities.
| Domain | Associated Twitter/X account | X/Twitter user ID |
| neonnettle.com | @NeonNettle (defunct) | 1911303422 |
| slaynews.com | @slaynews @slay_news_ | 145482331548746137 2511407130 |
| newsthud.com | @thudnews (suspended) | N.A. |
| cointhud.com | @cointhud | 959139346858369025 |
| dailyfetched.com | @dailyfetched | 1911303422 |
| raptornews.com | None identified | N.A. |
| newsaddicts.com | @News_Addicts | 2485221559 |
| evol.news | None identified | N.A. |
| newswize.com | @newswize | 826600694 |
Correction
5 May 2025: A reader pointed out an error in our initial report that the @NeonNettle account mentioning Slay News was deleted shortly after we reached out to Roughsedge and Slay News. The account was suspended by X, not deleted. We have corrected this error.
updates
5 May 2025: A reader brought to our attention a DMCA complaint filed by a company named Evil Corp Ltd. on behalf of Slay News. We included this new information in our report. The updates were made in the following sections: Paul Roughsedge and One Fox Digital and the Conclusion.
2 May 2025: We updated our report to include new information provided by One Fox Digital co-founder Stephen Anthony McQueen, indicating that neither he nor One Fox Digital are involved in the operation of Slay News. These updates were made in the following sections: Summary, Stephen Anthony McQueen, and the Conclusion.
25 April 2025: Following our report’s publication, we received a message from someone claiming to be Stephen Anthony McQueen. We updated our report to include their remarks on our findings.
