Not only that, but IMO context matters here. We are 20 days away from the election. People are standing in lines to vote as we speak.

If this was published at any other time (and the material for the story has apparently existed since December) the public and the professional media would have had time to scrutinize it, discuss its shortcomings, etc.

But, as Winston Churchill said "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." We can't do that and being complicit in spreading misinformation in the middle of an election is, I'm sure, still a strong memory that social media companies have from the 2016 election.

My guess as to how this will go is that it will take a week or two to authoritatively discredit the article, but by then, if left unchecked, the article will have already done its damage. The cynic in me says that the originators of the article already know that there isn't much truth here and that this is the point of releasing it while people are voting.