One of my favourite newsletters is Rusty’s Today in Tabs. It’s the perfect mix of internet things I’m already across and things I haven’t encountered and sometimes wish had never been brought to my attention (e.g. ball hog discourse). Yesterday, Rusty posted this correction:

I too had seen the story circulate very quickly on Bluesky that Ukraine’s destruction of a data centre had had a dramatic effect on Russian bot traffic. It was the sort of story engineered to go viral, being both anti-Putin and also anti- X The Everything App. Wouldn’t it feel delicious if all the fake traffic dried up?

But as the story that Rusty links to points out, that didn’t seem to be true.

“The ‘Russian bot takedown’ story is satisfying because people are tired of suspected manipulation,” DiResta added. “And the idea that a Ukrainian strike silenced fake accounts is a compelling story of victory against a common enemy. It also supports the comforting belief that your political enemies aren’t even real.”

But however tempting it is, now isn’t the time to believe in fiction, even if it feels like fact.

I was thinking about this outcome this week when I saw another link to a fandom story that bounced around a few months ago. The question of Dobby’s grave.

Before I get into this, let me be clear up front: JKR is using the money she earns from every aspect of the Harry Potter universe to fight against trans people’s human rights. Hold a fond place in your heart for a book you loved years ago, but there’s no place for active participation in the HP fandom in big 2026.

OK, carry on.

A few months ago this story started doing the rounds that obsessed Harry Potter fans had forced the relocation of the landing point of an undersea cable.

Let’s start with the basics. Dobby is a fictional character who obviously does not have a real grave. In the books, it’s not as if the location of his grave is marked on a map. Also in the books he’s buried in Cornwall, not Wales. But this is the place from the movies, and this is where fans have been visiting a makeshift memorial for years.

So much so that the National Trust had to ask fans to stop leaving socks, because they posed a risk to wildlife.

So, the idea that these fans had interfered in a massive infrastructure project by demanding that a fake grave in the wrong place should be protected appealed to everyone who thinks fans are unhinged and Harry Potter fans particularly unhinged. The Spectator derided the whole thing:

Over recent years Britain has found it impossible to complete almost any major infrastructure projects. Most of the time this is due to the discovery of a rare earthworm or – as anyone who has tried to restore a property in the countryside will know – that there is evidence of bats…Even this is merely a good-ish intention taken to a typically bureaucratic extreme. No such excuse can be made for the Dobby’s grave phenomenon. It is simply indicative of a country where the adults have all taken leave of their senses and handed over the decision-making to children who were never told “no.”

I mean, what we’re talking about here is straight-up confirmation bias. And I’m as guilty of it as anyone. When I saw the post above on bluesky implying that the person who had talked about this on a pod was joking, it lined up nicely for me. “See,” I thought smugly. “Blaming fans for something that had little or nothing to do with them. Day ending in y.”

And once again, it was Rusty at Tabs who rode to my rescue with a post subtitled “Harry Potter Adults are still the worst but not because of what they're currently being blamed for.”

As far as I can tell, the company responsible for this cable did everything absolutely properly and professionally, and didn’t ever plan to do anything which would disturb the beach at all. There were reasonable concerns about the fact that it’s a beautiful beach and tourist asset which shouldn’t be messed around with, but these were all taken into account at a very early stage in the planning because they were so obvious. Harry Potter fans didn’t cause anything to be changed. The project got permission really quite quickly and has been in operation for a while now.

But then Rebecca Watson (Skepchick) made a video in which she concluded the story probably was true, or true enough.

As Rebecca says:

I think I’ve made it very clear that I couldn’t give two shits about Dobby, or Harry Potter. Those books were published after I was already an adult, and I just don’t read books for kids. And these days, I think it’s unethical to monetarily support the author of those books, who as we all know is a hateful ghoul whose transphobia has turned her brains into pudding. But the stories resonated with kids, with their parents, and with adults, and they’re having fun paying tribute to that. I think it’s actually very sweet that these guys listened and put in a tiny bit of effort to respond, and it makes me feel good that Ludlam is sharing this story as an example of how they view projects moving forward: by thinking about how their work affects those around them and trying to be compassionate even if they can’t necessarily relate. If more people thought that way, we’d have fewer construction projects disrupting indigenous culture’s heritage sites, for example. Mount Rushmore would still look like a cool mountain.

I’ve been thinking about this in the context of the bot story, and in the context of getting my news and my perspectives through fun aggregators like Rusty, and my own very real confirmation bias. It’s only getting harder and harder to tell when stories are real or fake, and a firehose of information (and millions of bots, ironically!) means we take the glancing view as gospel. It’s making me want to be a lot slower, and a lot more skeptical. As Rusty says today, “in my defence: I did not think about it”. Neither did I. I’m going to try and think about it more in the future.

(Except, maybe the bot story was true?? who even knows anymore)

more good stuff

• as i was writing a subject line for this, I was humming a line from my favourite musical, Jesus Christ Superstar, in which Pilate sings “But what is truth? Is truth unchanging law? We both have truths, are mine the same as yours?”. Then, weirdly, I went to see the show last night in Tāmaki and the line was different?! Apparently the lyrics changed at some point in the nineties, and Pilate now sings, “But what is truth? Not easy to define. We both have truths, are yours the same as mine?” I don’t think musicals should CHANGE on you.

• it was interesting to read this post about the final demise of Foursquare. Back in its heyday I spent a long time fighting for the mayoralty of the beach where I live with Barnes. I love the timeline they had in their offices and it makes me want something similar for Lume.

• if you’ve spent any time with me you’ll know how obsessed I am with flight trackers and knowing where a plane flying overhead is going. So this is extremely my jam. Stowaway is a 3D rendered flight tracker where you get a view from any flight.

• i miss great data viz (remember when Information is Beautiful was the new hotness?) so I loved this project to find who the current “Kevin Bacon” is, at the centre of the Hollywood universe. Try and guess before you get to the answer.

finally, in my lego city

Forward this email to someone who agrees with all your takes.