I'm sure many of you saw the Washington Post's story on Friday that Russian hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a utility in Vermont and also the unraveling of that story over the following half day. What is so fascinating about this case from a "fake news" perspective is that it brings into sharp relief once again A) how the mainstream media forms a trust echochamber in which once one outlet runs a story, everyone follows without performing their own fact checking, B) the absolute trust frequently placed in government sources as "truth", C) the lack of fact checking even at tier one outlets like the Post and the lack of transparency in those processes (while answering other questions, the Post declined for a second time to comment in any way on how it fact checks articles and the level of rigor it requires prior to publication), D) how once an article is published, even if it is retracted or substantively changed, how that is often not clearly communicated to readers. I thought many of you would find of interest in particular the chronology of edits to the Post page courtesy of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and how it was almost a full day after the article had been rewritten that the Post finally appended an editors note acknowledging the wholesale changes - again points both to how newspapers now constantly rewrite their online articles over the course of a day or more and the immense power of the Archive in allowing us to trace those edits over time. To me, perhaps the most interesting piece here from a "fake news" perspective is how often "breaking news" becomes "fake news" as major details change once more facts become available. Given that in this case the Post was constantly rewriting the article over more than 12 hours after publication, it also raises the question of how we leverage all of these initiatives that look at news rewriting to help flag when articles are retracted or heavily edited and communicate that back to the general public - the tools are all there, but in terms of helping getting that back to the public. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2017/01/01/fake-news-and-how-the-wa... Kalev