I finally figured out how to fact-check viral news in 2 minutes flat

I kept getting tricked by those dramatic headlines about protests and political scandals, so I started using the Wayback Machine on the original source link to see if it was edited after the fact. Found 3 major news stories this month that had totally different first drafts than what they posted later, anyone else caught a site changing their story after it went viral?

3 comments

3 Comments

samrodriguez2d agoMost Upvoted

Honestly, have you ever caught them red-handed with the dates in the URL? I found one where a major outlet completely changed the headline from "Riots Erupt" to "Peaceful Protest" three hours after it went up, but the Wayback Machine had the original timestamp. What really blew my mind was when I checked a site's metadata on an article about a politician's quote and the first draft said one thing, the published version said the opposite, and they never added a correction note. Ngl, that's the kind of stuff that makes me wonder how many other stories get soft-edited without anyone noticing.

pat_murray532d ago

THAT'S the part that gets me - the missing correction notes. You think these places have any kind of internal rule about when they have to ADD one?

samrodriguez2d agoMost Upvoted

My buddy Mark got totally burned by this last month. He saw a viral story about a local politician getting arrested for fraud, screenshot the "updated" article an hour later that said it was just a paperwork error, but the original URL had an old headline about "handcuffs and perp walk." Wayback Machine caught the whole thing, three different versions in one afternoon, and the site never once put a correction note up. He sent me the timestamps and everything, it was wild.