The number of 'debunked' tags on old forum posts doubled overnight

I was looking up an old thread about a specific event from 2012, and every single post from that era now has a bright red 'debunked' banner. It wasn't there when I checked six months ago. Did a single moderator just go on a massive retroactive fact-checking spree?

3 comments

3 Comments

anna_henderson19d ago

Wait, doubled overnight? That's a huge jump. I mean, who has that kind of time to go back over a decade of posts. Maybe it's just me but that feels like a bot got loose or something. Kinda spooky to see history getting rewritten like that.

dakotawood19d ago

Honestly it might not be that deep. Sites run background updates all the time, fixing old links or counting things differently. A bot probably did it, but that's just automated maintenance, not someone rewriting history. Feels like we're reading way too much into a glitch in the numbers.

jordanhill19d ago

But what kind of maintenance needs to double a count from ten years ago? If it's just a bot fixing links, why would the total number of replies change at all? That seems like it's editing the record, not just updating a broken image. Makes you wonder what the actual trigger was.