Going to do a quick (I hope) @sundersays-style thread on this, because I think it's quite illustrative of how conspiracy theories work on here.

If you follow this currently unretweeted tweet link up to the top of the thread you'll find a much more widely shared tweet. https://twitter.com/ijclark/status/1348564893654401024

Which is this one. https://twitter.com/ijclark/status/1348000088438747138 1.6K retweets at the moment. I saw it via someone RTing @carolecadwalla's quote-tweet of it, which is currently at over 1K RTs.

I couldn't see IJ Clark's tweet she requoted initially, because I had muted that account. I know I usually only mute people if they've argued in bad faith or been abusive to me in some way, so I was intrigued. Looking at it, it soon became clear that the allegation wasn't true.

The article with the 'worse' headline was still online. Both were at the same time. Looking more closely, the one with the 'better' headline was what was originally used in print.

IJ Clark has now realized this, but has levelled new charges as a result, in a thread barely retweeted by anyone. New charges: The Spectator website is a mess; redirects are 'very misleading', and 'there needs to be much more transparency about the links and how it’s organised'.

All three are miles away from the original charge, which was they were engaged in covering up the extent of their support for Trump by quietly altering awful-looking headlines into something more acceptable. That was what was RTed originally. Nobody cares their site is a mess.

But not only was the original charge wrong, the new ones are daft, too, and just face-saving. All major websites have issues like this. I come across it daily in my work. If you have thousands of pages online, pages often gets repeated in error.

A sub-editor in 2016 probably thought they would give the piece a catchier headline than it had in the print edition, to get more clicks (which almost certainly would have worked). Four years later, someone else probably instructed the web team to upload back issues.

Perhaps a job for an intern. And they went through methodically putting them all online, not checking if any of the articles already were. They kept the old headline. If not exactly this scenario, something close to it would almost certainly have happened.

A bit incompetent? Sure. In an ideal world would every publication explain clearly how they have reorganised material on their site? Sure. But these are very common issues, in all media, left, right, if you like them or not.

It's a bait and switch to claim that the issue now is that The Spectator isn't perfect at web management when you've alleged in a viral tweet you haven't deleted that they were engaged in a cover up. That tweet has been shared by lots of others, in quote-tweets etc.

And it will stick, because it's actually not 'the Big Lie'. It's a small untruth, about something the people sharing it want to be true, about a publication they dislike. Murray got Trump wrong. Fine. The Spectator is slightly crap at web management. Fine.

But this website, by its nature and infrastructure, encourages the spread of thousands of such small untruths every day. Almost nobody will have clocked this guy's walking it back into this other nonsense about web skills. Nobody's sharing that. The small untruths blossom.

Unpicking this is tedious work - you have to get in the weeds and it's complicated and boring and it's easier to believe they're all villains conspiring, etc, and then argue the toss even when it's clear that's not what happened. Ultimately, this is much harder to deal with

than, say, Naomi Wolf claiming that Sweden's COVID measures are 'looking a lot like a global coup based on/predicated upon medical fascism'. Because that's easily dismissed by most. The subtler stuff is harder to spot. And we all fall for it, myself included.

(Supposedly quick thread ends.)