The quote-tweet is a newsroom with no editor.
A lot of what you think happened is a screenshot of a screenshot of a caption.
A primary source used to be a document, a tape, a named person on the record. Now a primary source is often a post, and the coverage is a quote-tweet that adds a joke, then a second quote-tweet that adds a moral, then a blog that copies the moral because the blog cannot load the original without an account.
By hour four, the original post is a rumor about itself.
A method
- Open the original, not the viral restatement.
- Check the date. Old posts get new crimes attached every week.
- Check whether the account is the person, a fan, a parody, or a stolen name.
- If you cannot verify those, you do not publish a ‘story.’ You publish a question, or you wait.
Waiting is allowed. The timeline will not wait with you. That is the whole business model of the timeline.
Why this matters for ads
Networks punish sites that launder hoaxes, even accidentally. The cheap version of internet coverage is to be fast and wrong. The version that still exists in a year is to be slower than Twitter and clearer than Twitter.
Glare will look slow next to a meme page. Good. A meme page cannot get AdSense. A meme page also cannot look you in the eye when the screenshot was from 2019.
