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by tzs 3776 days ago
You are conflating the rightness or not of the article itself with the rightness or not of Betteridge's law applied to the article. As Betteridge himself explains [1]:

    This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that
    any headline which ends in a question mark can be
    answered by the word "no." The reason why
    journalists use that style of headline is that they
    know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t
    actually have the sources and facts to back it up,
    but still want to run it.
When you have an article like this one which uses the question style of headline and then answers the question "yes" it is not a Betteridge headline even if others might argue that the answer should have been "no". Even if the article answers "no", it still isn't necessarily a Betteridge headline if there was actually some reasonable question over whether the answer was "yes" or "no".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...