Earlier today, it took less than 20 minutes for  journalists to figure out and expose a well-known Twitter prankster’s fake report on the death of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak. At one time – not even a few months ago – I’d say it’d be likely this hoax wouldn’t have been caught before lots of news orgs had reported the “news”.

I see it as a sign we’re getting better at this verification business.

 

 

* I feel this deserved a special shoutout to Anthony De Rosa, who is the unfortunate example of a journalist biting on a bad hoax in my regular verification training slides. Now he’s included here on the side of good.