Sleuthing a fake 'leaked' audio clip took me 3 whole evenings

Found this viral 'leaked' argument between two A-listers on TikTok and my timeline was all over it. Turns out the audio was spliced from a 2017 podcast and a reality show fight, took me three nights to match the exact background hum and a cough. I'm talking time stamps, waveform comparisons, the whole nerd routine, way longer than I expected for a 40-second clip. The original poster never corrected it, and now two gossip sites are running with it as fact. Anyone else spend stupid hours debunking stuff that nobody will even acknowledge afterwards?

1 comments

1 Comment

angela_morgan17d ago

THREE EVENINGS, that's wild. The cough matching is what got me, I can't believe you actually went through the effort of isolating a background cough to prove it was fake. Most people just retweet the clip and move on with their lives, but you went full detective mode on a 40-second thing. The fact that two gossip sites are now treating it as gospel makes me SO mad though, because they'll never run a correction even if you handed them the proof on a silver platter. I've done the same thing with a video once, spent a whole Saturday lining up shadows and lighting angles to show it was from different days, and when I tagged the original poster, they just blocked me. It's honestly exhausting that truth has to fight this hard against a stupid meme that someone made in five minutes.