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by lukifer 3848 days ago
At last, we've found the counter-example to Betteridge's Law of Headlines.
2 comments

There are many counter-examples. The important part isn’t that the answer is “no”, as the Law states, but that the story is tired enough to need a question in its headline in the first place. Andrew Marr’s explanation focusses especially on this aspect of the Law: “A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or over-sold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means ‘don’t bother reading this bit’.” He makes a few assumptions, but I think the overall takeaway of “question mark equals clickbait” rings true.
the title has been changed to include a ? when posting here it seems, (or they changed it on theatlantic.com). Nevertheless your comment about ? equalling clickbait really made me think.

Edit: ok I just realized that the summary at the top was used as the title when posting here. I don't feel there is anything wrong with this.

Agreed.
There's a corollary to Betteridge's Law: when someone posts an article with a question mark in the headline to Hacker News, someone will inevitably post a comment to the article that mentions Betteridge's Law.