The First Stirrings of the “Fact-Check”

Although the “fact-checking” phenomenon is a very recent one, to trace its boundaries we must go back nearly half a century.

When the first semblances of a fact-checking entity appeared, the internet was an infant. There was no Google, no Facebook and certainly no Twitter.

Before all of this there was something called “Usenet”, a bare-bones internet messaging service. Founded in 1979, Usenet was born a full decade before the World Wide Web was even a thing.

In these days, it was essentially a requirement to be a computer geek to own one. Just about every “personal computer” was overpriced or extremely difficult to use.

What is it about “Usenet” that interests us? A prototype of the world’s first “fact-checking” site spawned here in 1991. The world-famous fact-checking site Snopes has its origins in an obscure group on Usenet called alt.folklore.urban or AFU.

The name of this group gives a decent hint as to what it was about: the “debunking” of so-called urban legends and myths.

One thing might now be apparent — a site dedicated to urban legends and “folklore” is a different beast than today’s Snopes. The modern-day Snopes focuses almost solely on the political. Yet, some might be tempted to say, “Can they really be that different? They both debunk things, don’t they?”

The truth is, they really are that different. But why?

To see the difference in all its detail we should look into what an “urban legend” actually is. Once we see what the term means, we will be able to see just how different it is than the focus of today’s fact-checking sites.

I’ll first mention that the term, “urban legend” is an extremely new one, coined in the mid-1980s. Despite this, the gist of the term has been around for millennia. Where we take an urban legend to be a collectively believed story which happens to be unverified, we can confidently claim that there have been urban legends since the dawn of human language itself.

Some of the most recognizable urban legends technically fall under the other term, “folklore”. Legends like the infamous “Loch Ness Monster” and “Bigfoot” are longstanding features of local culture and thus fall under the “folklore” designation. But in addition to these regional stories we have many newer, more wide-ranging tales. These are the “urban legends” proper.

Examples of urban legends include the New York City “sewer alligator” and the supposed rural teenage pastime of “cow tipping”. Urban legends are those wacky, off-the-wall tales you are tempted to laugh at. On the flip side, many of these stories make us wonder, deep down, if there couldn’t be some grain of truth to them.

These tales are what the membership at the Usenet forum “alt.folklore.urban” (AFU) lived for.

The people who trolled through this forum were never content to sit back and raise a mere eyebrow at the goofy story their uncle Tommy told them; these people felt the urge to disprove and debunk.

And with their newfound computer technology and proliferating stores of information, disprove and debunk they did.