Loading…
10
I called that celebrity split fake news for 3 weeks, then a $12 receipt from a Venice coffee shop made me eat my words
When a gossip page posted that two actors had broken up, I was sure it was made up because neither had said anything and both were still liking each other's photos. Then a friend who works near Abbot Kinney sent me a photo of a coffee receipt from a Tuesday in March with both their names on one order, which looked like a normal couple thing, and I figured the breakup talk was junk. But two days later a different outlet ran the same story and a fan account matched the date to a day they were both supposed to be in different cities, which made me look closer at the first post. Turns out the original page had been around only 11 days and had already posted 4 other split rumors that never happened. So is there a way to check if a gossip account is just farming clicks before I believe anything it posts?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
ruby6591mo ago
Spent way too much energy on this whole thing and I'm not sure why. Celebrity gossip accounts farm clicks all day, that's the whole point of them, and a coffee receipt with two names on it proves basically nothing either way. You're right that the 11 day old account with four fake splits is a red flag, but you didn't need a fan account to tell you that, you could've just looked at the post history from the start. Here's the thing though, does it actually matter? Two famous people you don't know might or might not be dating, and either way your life is the same tomorrow. Check the account age and how many wild claims they've made if you want, that's fine, but treating a breakup rumor like it needs fact checking is a lot of work for zero payoff.
9