The Epidemiology of a Hoax

Nothing spreads without a starting point.

We find the first upload, then the crop, the new caption, and the moment a joke becomes a fact. Most viral claims, images, and stories have a recoverable origin — an earlier post, an uncropped version, a different context, or a clear source that later versions erase or rewrite. Patient Zero is a fact-checking project that traces those origins.

The work is straightforward: locate the earliest known version of a circulating claim or image, document how it changed, and show what the original actually was. Sometimes the original is a joke, a local news item, an unrelated photo, or a deliberate fabrication. Sometimes the claim is true but has been stripped of important context. In every case, the sequence matters — the first post, the first serious caption, the first time it is treated as evidence — because that sequence is usually still visible and usually changes the meaning of the version that goes viral.

We are not primarily interested in ranking outlets or scoring political points. We are interested in the path a specific post or image took from its starting point to the form in which it is now being shared. That path is the fact-check.