For the most part, though, the articles debunking the rumor get extremely little attention. (For a more crystalline example of all that, you can look to Buzzfeed's coverage of the story. Its initial story got more than 30,000 shares; its debunking of that story got just over 1,000.) Which means that news organizations often have very little incentive—direct, commercial incentive, at least—to put their time and energy into them. As a result, as Silverman puts it: The Total Recall rumor is "a story that, I would argue, the average person probably doesn't know is not true."
The larger problem with all that is that rumors, once they're put out there into the maw of the media, are notoriously hard to correct. There's the fact that "sorry, just kidding about that three-boobed lady thing" is nowhere near as sharable as a "whoa, three-boobed lady!" thing in the first place. But there's also the fact that there is very little uniformity among media outlets about how updates, corrections, retractions, and the like should be presented to readers. Most outlets will simply update a story that contains a debunked claim; a few will write new stories altogether, linking to the previous one in the process. That can leave readers, however, in a kind of epistemological limbo: You're never quite sure what's been verified and what has not. Trust is a precious resource in journalism; many outlets haven't fully figured out how to preserve it.
"So much of this stuff is public before news organizations get to it," Silverman points out. "So that's a very different dynamic from what used to happen. So if something is by default public, how do you decide when you're doing to point at it in a way that's responsible? And then how do you deal with it as it sort of takes its life path to being true or false?" Bringing some data to bear on those questions, he's hoping, will help news outlets start to answer them.
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