[netsharc]

Seeing the screenshot of the headlines, "mimic" (HN title) is a different to "posing as" (article title). If I can extrapolate from 3 headlines screenshot there, the sites have generic boring looks (maybe they're Wordpress sites), but they pose to be a news site for Sevilla, Rome, or Milan. Whereas when "mimicking", I would expect them to be copying the design of well-known news sites (I've seen fake CNN-looking sites).

It's always amusing/depressing when people claim something, usually something fake-news-ey or propaganda) and link to one of these random Wordpress-looking sites as their "news source". I remember someone linking to a page that claimed that a map of the March 2011 Japanese tsunami effects measured throughout the Pacific[1] was a map of the radiation from the nuclear accident, so people do fall for it, because not everyone is as discerning as us super-clever HN readers. ;)

[1] The map from https://www.pmel.noaa.gov/news-story/new-study-shows-some-co..., but the original caption was under the map and not superimposed on the map, and was cropped by the fake-news peddler.

[drewg123]

I'm not the submitter, but there is a length limit on post titles. I've run into this before with articles whose titles exceed that limit, and I've had to "edit" the titles to fit. I imagine the submitter had the same issue, and didn't catch the different connotation of "mimic" vs "posing as", which does seem to change the meaning some.

Dang: Do you think you could raise the length limit by 50 characters or so? Most of the problems I've had with title length limits seem to have been just a few words that I had to squeeze down..

[kieto]

Submitter here, this is exactly what happened, I hit the length limit with the non-editorialized title, so I tried to reduce it the best I could :)

[mistrial9]

meanwhile, a woman from Japan came to visit the David Brower Center in Berkeley soon after the meltdown, because someone there had been recording TEPCO and National Radiation Levels info since the Fukishima events. Those recordings were in dispute, they did not match. There was intense national interest, international science poking in, and in fact the public records were in dispute.

The anecdote here only says "I thought the website was this, and it turned out to be that" .. so many ways that small bit can fail. Very significant world event with actual conflicting information..