A Denver Post news exposé on DoBetterDNVR’s lack of transparency and indifference to accuracy steamed a teapot tempest on talk radio and social media this past week. A national right-wing site, The Federalist, repeated the false allegations from an anonymous source, that The Denver Post reporter cooperated with the mayor’s office to doxx several DoBetterDNVR past contributors.

The victim narrative read like this: fight city hall and elites will try and intimidate you into silence!

The trouble with that story is that there was no cooperation between the paper and the government. Nobody was doxed — that requires addresses and malicious intent — and no one is trying to intimidate anyone.

For defending the reporter and journalism generally in my column last week, DoBetterDNVR fans littered my social media account with the word “communist” (and other c-words that cannot be repeated here), the usual vitriol, and miscellaneous fabrications. They get points for creativity for the Goebbels comparison; “fascist” is so overused.

Joking aside, this week’s teapot tempest prompts a serious question: how did an anonymous social media influencer gain the trust of 144,000 followers, and dupe a reputable newspaper to beleive they were doxed.

A city in trouble

I get the attraction to DoBetterDNVR, the anonymous social media influencer which posts videos of lawless behavior along with anti-administration commentary, facts, rumors, and misinformation. Not long ago, vagrants stole my sister’s bikes. A friend confronted one thief and got a bike back. Police were called. They did nothing but watch as another miscreant dallied about on the other set of stolen wheels. Unless my sister could recite the bike’s serial number, the police said they would not intervene.

Another family member was run over by a drunk driver and left for dead with 30-some broken bones. The culprit, though known, remains free on a technicality.

These instances of crime and injustice in the Denver Metro Area are infuriating, but I know they do not paint a complete picture. The plural of anecdote, after all, isn’t data.

In fact, crime trends in Denver are moving in the right direction. There have been fewer thefts, homicides, and drug and alcohol crimes in 2025 than there were during the first half of 2024, according to the Common Sense Institute. Though crime rates for most categories remain higher than they were in 2020, the homicide rate is at the lowest level in a decade. Though Denver could do better, the city did not make the most recent top 20 most dangerous cities list at U.S. News and World Report (Pueblo, however, ranked 11th).

These facts do not diminish victims’ pain or insulate authorities from criticism, but they do create a more accurate depiction of Denver than can be gleaned from individual experiences.

But if you believe that Denver’s crime rate is increasing, such facts are unsatisfying, and those who report them are unreliable. The human tendency to seek out information that confirms what we believe — confirmation bias — will drive you to a source on the Internet that corroborates false impressions. That’s why videos of criminal activity posted on social media are compelling. I can’t get my sister’s bike back, but I can look at a video showing a bum’s pile of disassembled stolen bikes and hope Denver Mayor Mike Johnston takes some heat for not sufficiently cracking down on these crimes.

While understandable frustration drives Denverites to an anonymous social media poster to “see what’s really happening,” they are ill-served by the quality of information they find there — a mix of facts, rumor, scandalous images, and misinformation. DoBetterDNVR seeks to hold city government accountable for enabling lawless behavior like vagrancy, public drug use, urban camping, and vandalism by exposing and posting it, a laudable aim, but its means are less than ethical. Good goals do not excuse dodgy deeds. That is likely why those named in The Post’s story went to such great lengths to pressure the paper not to publish their names.

Confirmation bias, partisan dislike for the current city administration, populist distrust of institutions, legitimate public policy differences, and the frustrations of city living explain some of it.

Also, the internet lacks the standards and institutions of older information technology that help consumers distinguish between information and misinformation. Social media, in particular, treats them indistinguishably.

The future of social media journalism

If history is any guide, however, such guardrails will evolve in time. This has happened with each iteration of information technology from the printing press to radio and television. Information technology democratizes access to information and the ability to synthesize and disseminate it. Conventions and institutions that enable people to distinguish fact from fiction, the honest from the dishonest, follow.

For example, the invention of the printing press fueled an astronomical rise in the number of books published. Anyone with access to a press could print anything. Manuals, like Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1487, claiming to show readers how to identify witches, became popular. Witch hunts, rare up until then, became common, leading to the unjust prosecution and execution of some 45,000 people, mostly women.

Critics of these books also used printing presses to express skepticism and demand evidence. Over time, the public started to demand the same. New conventions like footnotes and peer review arose and new laws governing copyright and libel. Over time, reputable publishing houses pushed out less honest ones.

Newspapers, likewise, have evolved. A 16th-century German invention, the initial broadsides reported anything writers found pertinent — rumor, opinion, fact, and falsehood. Benjamin Harris’s Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, the first newspaper in the American colonies, published in 1690, was no different. Funded by political parties and subscribers, such papers were thoroughly partisan and parochial. With the mid-19th-century invention of advertising and the debut of wire services, papers became less expensive, less partisan, more factual, and less opinionated.

Papers also became a more lucrative business. Feeding their massive media empires, media barons like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer competed for readership by printing sensationalist stories, gossip, and exaggerated claims. The era of yellow journalism did not last forever, however. Public outcry prompted reform. Papers adopted codes of ethics that demanded transparency, accuracy, and objectivity. These norms are shared by reporters on television, radio, and many news websites.

The internet with its websites, blogs, podcasts, videos, and social media platforms, has not yet caught up. People use proxies like site quality, number of followers, and agreement with content to determine trustworthiness.

But as this week’s controversy over DoBetterDNVR shows, these proxies are insufficient. In time, new standards and conventions will evolve.

Truth will prevail over error. In the meantime, consumers must do better in discerning the difference.

 Krista Kafer is a Sunday Denver Post columnist.

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