@gsuberland@chaos.social I'm reminded of how back in the AnonOps days we decided to do a little experiment and send a completely false and unverifiable claim about a non-existent hacker group (with an obviously unserious name) to a bunch of Dutch and Flemish news outlets.

A bunch just ignored it. Several national tabloids printed it without any verification - one of the tabloids even *made up extra stuff* to fill the story, without asking anyone. We were just baffled by this. The only outlet that did any attempt at fact-checking and then decided not to run the story, was a small regional outlet.

It's hilariously (and frankly concerningly) easy to get something published in large mainstream press outlets with absolutely zero credentials or verification.