Took me 11 days to trace a 2016 forum rumor about a band breakup back to one deleted tweet
I got sucked into a rabbit hole last week trying to prove where a rumor about a band splitting up actually started. Everyone kept saying "it came from Twitter" but nobody had the actual post, so I dug through archive sites for 11 straight days after work. Finally found a screenshot from March 2016 where a guy with 40 followers said the drummer quit, and that single post got picked up by a music blog two days later. The wild part is the band never split, they just went quiet for a year to record an album, and the rumor outlived the truth forever. I ended up writing the whole timeline down with links because it was too good to lose. Has anyone else chased an old rumor back to its very first post like this?
Ha, so the whole time the band was just in a quiet room recording and the internet was writing their breakup album for them. That's the thing about old rumors, the first post is always some guy with 40 followers and zero proof, and somehow it beats the actual truth every time. Eleven days of archive digging is a lot of work, but at least now the timeline exists instead of just floating around as "everyone knows it came from Twitter.