If you’ve been watching Twitter or Facebook closely this month, you may have noticed the emergence and increasingly visible countercurrent: 2014, so far, is shaping up to be the year of the viral hoax debunk. It’s a public, performative effort by newsrooms to warn, identify, chase down, and explain that the story you just saw — most likely on Facebook.
Truth telling and debunking are fundamental journalistic acts, online or otherwise, but the viral debunk is a distinctive take on an old standby; it’s a form-fitting response to a new style of hoax, much in same the way that Snopes and Hoax-Slayer were an answer to ungoverned email hoaxes, or that Politifact and FactCheck.org arose in response to a narrow, but popular, category of misinformation — false statements by public figures, uncritically amplified in the frenzy of political campaign.
