Fact Check

Is Disneyland Abandoning California, Moving to Texas?

A routine review of content labeled satire.

Published Sept. 8, 2020

 (Wikipedia)
Image Via Wikipedia
Claim:
The Walt Disney Company announced in September 2020 that Disneyland would be moved from California to Texas.

On Aug. 31, 2020, Uncle Walt's Insider published an article positing that the Disneyland theme park was leaving California and moving to Texas:

BREAKING: Disneyland is abandoning California, moving to Texas

Saying they’ve “finally had enough” and the state is “just nuts,” Disneyland officials have announced that the park is leaving California.

The park joins hundreds of thousands of California residents fleeing the state each year. Various reasons have been given for the mass exodus, but most common are the high cost of living, the overreaching liberal government, or that the state is “just nuts.”

This item was not a factual recounting of real-life events. The article originated with a website that describes its output as being humorous or satirical in nature, as follows:

All events, persons, and companies depicted herein, including Disney, Walt Disney, and The Disney Company, are fictitious, and any similarity to actual persons, living, dead or otherwise, or to actual firms, is coincidental. Really. The same goes for any similarities to actual facts.

The satire site's Facebook page carries a similar disclaimer:

Only the most super-reliable theme park news from the most super-reliable theme park gurus. All stories internally peer-reviewed for minimum 17% accuracy.

In addition to the site's disclaimer, Uncle Walt's Insider also contains several tongue-in-cheek references indicating its satirical nature. A banner at the top of the website, for instance, farcically claimed that it won the "Best Made Up Awards."

This banner also notes that Snopes previously identified Uncle Walt's Insider as a "relatively obscure" satire website in 2018. While this is true, Uncle Walt's Insider has been publishing satire for more than two years now. To our knowledge, that makes Uncle Walt's a contender to be the longest-running satire site solely devoted to Disney theme park content on the web.  

For background, here is why we sometimes write about satire/humor.