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From an unnamed colleague of Dave Weigel:
“Too good to check” used to be a warning to newspaper editors not to jump on bullshit stories. Now it’s a business model.
If you didn’t follow the great Elan Gale Twitter hoax over the weekend, click the link for more. Weigel’s point is that just because something “goes viral” on social media is no excuse for publishing a story about it without bothering to perform even basic fact checking. Sure, that would mean fewer dumb pieces of clickbait and thus fewer clicks, but if getting lots of hits is now an all-purpose excuse to shrug your shoulders when something turns out not to be true, maybe the sites that buy into this business model should start calling themselves something other than news outlets.
