To build on my previous comment [1], and those by thinkloop, it's plausible to me that one of the layers of social commentary they targeted was about clickbait

To build on my previous comment [1], and those by thinkloop, it's plausible to me that one of the layers of social commentary they targeted was about clickbait and 'fake news'. This story itself is purpose-made for viral speculation, which these days also implies clickbait fodder; I can already see the articles in the template of "The True Story Behind the Super Bowl Potato Ad" and "You Won't Believe What This Game Company Spent $xx Million On"; all the while as planetjones pointed out the reporting on the event has not yet been corroborated by multiple independent sources, where those sources themselves are known to have existed ahead of time and are reporting truthful information. Perhaps this will change as the day passes, given how the announcement was made in the middle of the night, but so far all the evidence of this ever having occurred derives from either the Medium announcement from an account that only contains this one post [2] while their known-good official website [3] (and other known-good official channels, like their Tumblr) are devoid of any such announcement, and the evidence presented in the Medium post itself is a screenshot of some Tweets and a link to a Youtube video [4] (which in all fairness was uploaded by Cards Against Humanity (co-?)creator Max Temkin [5], but not posted on the official CAH channel [6]. While it's possible that the accounts making the Tweets are real and the content of the Tweets is truthfully based on an actual event they witnessed, we've yet to see evidence provided by sources known to not be affiliated with CAH -- which is a different threshold than 'not known to be affiliated with' -- that the ad indeed aired in one or more markets -- one this evidence arrives we will have completed rudimentary fact-checking good enough to report on the matter. Until then, any attempt to 'report' on this situation fails to meet the basic criteria for 'news', but is instead repeating a viral rumour that appears to have been started by either the first-party or an as-yet unverified third party. I surmise that at least one low-quality report will be made about the story while still unverified -- let alone all the social media buzz that the story will generate in either case; thereby demonstrating how easy it is to manufacture a story; for speculation's sake, the same could have been accomplished by creating a plausibly-named brand-new Medium account, uploading a Youtube video, creating a few Twitter accounts or paying actual people to Tweet some choice lines. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13577181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13577181 [2] https://medium.com/@CardsAgainstHumanity https://medium.com/@CardsAgainstHumanity [3] https://www.cardsagainsthumanity.com/ https://www.cardsagainsthumanity.com/ [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcWW-pN_niE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcWW-pN_niE [5] https://www.youtube.com/user/MaxTemkin/about https://www.youtube.com/user/MaxTemkin/about [6] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcIntWOSU38r6V0YaPLNjRg https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcIntWOSU38r6V0YaPLNjRg