Verrit

» see verrit.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

The slogan was "media for the 65.8 million," which was Hillary Clinton's popular vote count in 2016. That tells you nearly everything about the product. Verrit existed to give people who had lost an election material for arguing about it online, and it addressed them by their vote count.

Peter Daou built it with his wife Leela Daou in the summer of 2017. Daou had advised Clinton's 2008 campaign and had run Shareblue, so he was not a stranger to partisan media. The format was a card: one quotation or statistic, set as a graphic sized for Twitter, carrying a seven digit identification code. You could type that code into Verrit and it would confirm the card had come from Verrit. The first archived capture of the domain is 13 August 2017.

Clinton endorsed it on 3 September 2017. Daou described it as an online hub where her backers could find shareable facts to take out to social media, and said the site had no financial relationship with her. Within hours of the endorsement Verrit went down, and Daou blamed a "significant and sophisticated" cyber attack. The archive caught what the visitors saw: Cloudflare's error page assets, crawled on 8 September 2017.

I was in Ankara, thirty three years old, with no stake in any of this. An American argument about an American election is about as far from my internet as it gets. What held my attention was the mechanism rather than the politics. A verification code stamped on a screenshot is a genuine engineering answer to the problem of doctored screenshots, and somebody had shipped it here first.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the decline ~

The verification code solved the wrong half of the problem. It could prove a card was authentically Verrit's, which was never in doubt, while saying nothing about whether the claim on the card was true or fairly sourced. The Observer's review made that point directly: the cards led with the message and treated sourcing as decoration.

Reviewers were unkind in a way that is rare for a launch this small, and they were unkind from both directions. Politico's Jack Shafer called it "a propaganda rag so shameless it would make Kim Jong Un blush." The Ringer filed it under the headline "a media company for almost nobody," which turned out to be the accurate reading. Daou had built for an audience of 65.8 million and almost none of them came.

~ the funny part ~

Verrit suspended all functionality on 11 February 2018 without a warning or an explanation. The shell kept answering for months after the product stopped: the archive has 200s running through to late September 2018, and the title on that final page still read "Verrit - Verified information for politically engaged citizens."

Under the page was WordPress 4.9.8 running the Divi theme. The site built to certify the provenance of political claims spent its last months as an off-the-shelf install serving a page that no longer did anything.

In December 2018 the domain was pointed at a Twitter profile, and that is where verrit.com still sends you today. Daou left the Democratic Party in April 2020. By 2023 he was managing presidential campaigns against it, briefly for Marianne Williamson and then for Cornel West, resigning from both within a few months.

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