I do realize that. But look at the OP again.

  > Ah but we're just gonna jump to conclusions instead.

I'm not trying to say WaPo is doing grade A journalism here. In fact, personally I think they aren't. A conversation about clickbait titles is a different one and one we've had for over a decade now...

But are we going to recognize the irony here? Is OP not calling the kettle black here? They *also* jumped to conclusions. This doesn't vindicate WaPo or make their reporting any less sensational or dubious, but we shouldn't make the same faults we're angry at others for making.

And pay careful attention to what I've said.

  >>> You should be skeptical, but this is easy enough to test, so why not do some test to see if it is obviously false or not?
  >>> I'd appreciate it if others would reply with their replication efforts

I do want to find the truth of the matter here. I could have definitely wrote it better, but I'm appealing to our techy community because we have this capability. We can figure this out. The second part is much harder to verify and there's non-nefarous reasons that might lead to this, but we should try to figure this out instead of just jumping to conclusions, right?