One benefit of working in the media is that I tend to approach most news with extreme caution. I got my first taste for skepticism when journalists I once admired turned into boosters for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003. Few lessons were learned even by the time later conflicts in Syria and Libya rolled round in 2011 and 2014. The experience has left me attuned to journalism’s aporetic conflict of truth and belief, or disinformation and facts. 

This week’s Letter from London illustrates the friction between rumor and reality on an extremely hyperlocal scale, so please bear with me. On the morning of Saturday, August 7, I woke at my usual time of around 6.30am and made myself a cup of coffee. After a 15-month-long pandemic, which has seen gyms and group sports largely locked down, I had begun retraining for ParkRun, a free, weekly series of timed events held across the world and organized by a U.K. charity. 

I was almost certainly going to leave my house around 7.30 a.m. for a run around the local Finsbury Park, which would end with another coffee overlooking a nearby nature reserve. That might sound like a healthy way to begin the weekend, but unfortunately, I was also scrolling through my Twitter feed. #FinsburyPark was trending — a rare phenomenon — and I decided to have a look. I now wish I hadn’t. 

The hashtag’s top tweets were a mixture of chaos, rumors and rebuttals. In a nutshell, something major had happened or not happened overnight. Getting to the bottom of it took some time, but a toxic mixture of facts and lies eventually emerged. At around 7.45 p.m. the previous evening, dozens of police were dispatched to an address around the corner, to investigate a tip-off that that as many as 70 venomous snakes had escaped a residential address. Officers shut down a road close to my home at around 8 p.m. and carried out a series of searches for just over an hour, before declaring the incident to be the result of a hoax call.