Sometime on 6th August Newham council quietly published a notice for the Beckon by-election on its website. I noticed this the following day and wondered why this didn’t merit a story in the News section or even a tweet:
Then on Sunday morning when I was catching up on the news via my RSS reader I noticed a story in the Newham feed headlined “Date for Beckton Ward by-election”.
When I clicked through I was surprised to see it dated 6th August:
Well it definitely hadn’t been there on the 7th when I looked after seeing the Notice had been published, nor when I checked again on the 8th (I know, I really should get out more).
So I checked the source code for the page:
That’s just weird.
Why would the council fake the date on a news story to make it appear as if it had been published two days before it had actually been created?
No doubt there’s a perfectly simple, rational explanation for what otherwise appears to be an outright lie. I’m just too dim to see it.
forestgatedotnet 
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