General Discussion

Evaluation by academia
In 2017, the Asan Institute for Policy Studies said that Occupy Democrats "share[s] both real and fake news ... further blurring the line between fact and fiction".[14] Some scientific studies have identified Occupy Democrats as a fake news website.[46][47][48][49]

According to the University of Iowa library, Occupy Democrats "has been known to show misleading, fake, or exaggerated partisan content".[22] The Valencia College library includes Occupy Democrats on a list of sources that "cannot usually be accepted at face value and need further verification from other sources to determine if information is credible".[50] In a 2017 poster session developed by the library staff of the University of California at Merced, Occupy Democrats was rated "questionable" for its factual reporting and was noted for "not having a very good fact check record".[51]

Evaluation by media
Occupy Democrats has repeatedly been criticized by fact-checking websites for posting "exaggerated or invented news stories". Brooke Binkowski, a managing editor at Snopes, commented that Occupy Democrats' headlines were often "extremely misleading".[33]

According to The Atlantic, Occupy Democrats' posts are "studded with straightforwardly fake news".[16] The Los Angeles Weekly reports that its posts are "free from the constraints of objectivity and, in some cases, facts".[5] A 2016 BuzzFeed News analysis found it was "the least accurate left-wing page" of several Facebook pages it reviewed and cited one instance where it published a satirical story as fact.[52] In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, The New York Times reported that Occupy Democrats "twisted facts to push a critical narrative about Republicans".[53]

In 2017, PolitiFact included Occupy Democrats in its list of fake news websites. However, PolitiFact later removed Occupy Democrats from its list of fake news sites and, according to the Miami New Times, "admitted Occupy Democrats should never have been on the list in the first place".[54] As of December 2020, PolitiFact classified 62% of 16 posts shared by Occupy Democrats it had evaluated as "not accurate".[55] A further 31% it considered "half-true".[55]

In 2021, a post shared by Occupy Democrats claimed Nikki Haley had changed her first name to sound more "white" in order to further her political career.[56] A fact check column by USA Today reported that Nikki was her legal middle name, she had used it as a given name since childhood, and that it was of ethnic Punjabi origin...

Popular perception
In a 2017 survey among US readers, Occupy Democrats was voted the "least trusted news source" among American readers, just below Breitbart News and BuzzFeed.[66] In September 2018, the English Wikipedia deprecated Occupy Democrats as a source due to its unreliability.[67][68] In an October 2018 Simmons Research survey of 38 news organizations, Occupy Democrats was ranked the third least-trusted news organization by Americans, underneath Breitbart News, the Daily Kos and the Palmer Report, with InfoWars and The Daily Caller being lower-ranked.