John Teets and I faced a conundrum early on Sept. 10, 2017: Should we post on social media that Hurricane Irma had damaged the Snake Creek Bridge so severely that vehicle access to Key West and the Florida Keys was gone?

Hurricane Irma made landfall on Cudjoe Key as a Cat 4 storm with 115-mph winds at 9:10 that Sunday morning. Shortly after, someone posted a video and a warning that the Snake Creek Bridge was out of commission. Within minutes that message was being widely — and wildly — reposted.

The last remaining drawbridge in the Keys is at Mile Marker 86 in the Upper Keys. If the Snake Creek Bridge were out, the results would be devastating to recovery efforts, emergency teams and evacuees who’d eventually want to get home. If the bridge was fine — and if we posted that it wasn’t — we’d scare the bejesus out of everyone turning to John and me and the Key West Hurricane Irma Facebook page for news and information.

We compromised. We couldn’t ignore the initial report, especially since it was rapidly gaining traction. So we shared a post from Keys Weekly, a trusted source, that said the bridge was out. At 2:30 p.m., we updated our post to say “conflicting reports.” At 6 p.m., we updated that the bridge was OK.

Social media’s easy immediacy is great for breaking news. It’s also a disaster in the making when you’re wrong. Despite updates, clarifications, corrections and even deletions, that original post is impossible to claw back. John and I knew there was something just a hair off beat with the Snake Creek Bridge information, which is why, while sharing dozens of other news posts that day, we kept coming back to the bridge question until we could nail down the truth from reliable sources.

Call it Spidey Sense.

Trump in Key West? The evidence just didn’t track

My Spidey Sense got a workout over the past weekend. All day Saturday and into Sunday, Facebook warriors in Key West were tripping over themselves to herald President Donald Trump’s visit to the island. Air Force One at the Boca Chica Naval Air Station. The United Street entrance to the military’s Joint Interagency Task Force South locked down. A crew member shopping along Duval. Flight path screenshots showing the plane’s arrival. A secret briefing at JIATF-S prepping for an invasion of Venezuela?

Someone asked an AI bot if Trump were in town. And sure enough, the AI tool reported — based on nothing but the wild social media posts — that, indeed, the big man was here. Its screenshot became “proof” that Trump was at a secret briefing.

The partisan commenters went nuts. So did my Spidey Sense.

After all, it could be true. The pictures of the huge blue-and-white 747 appear real, though there’s no way to tell conclusively when or where the pictures were taken, and no one seems to be able to confirm who took those images and whether they were actually taken over the weekend at Boca Chica. The metadata that usually would disclose that is missing from the photographs posted to social media.

JIATF-S confirms only that the plane in question wasn’t Air Force ONE. There are two similar 747s, but they’re only called Air Force One when the president is on board. Someone with enough political chops to commandeer one of those two 747s might have been aboard, but it wasn’t the president.

We ARE in the midst of a spiraling Venezuelan military showdown, so a briefing at JIATF-S would be in order. The United Street gates were closed, but that happens more frequently than most of us pay attention. And that shopping crew member? Completely plausible since I know the original poster. After all, what’s a crew member going to do with a few free hours?

So what triggered my Spidey Sense when there was so much circumstantial “evidence” that Trump was at JIATF-S? First it was the “confirming” screenshot. The darn thing looked like and read like an AI-generated response. It sure wasn’t official and it was only attributed to social media posts — a definite signal it shouldn’t be trusted.

Second it was the absence of reporting from the traveling press gaggle that’s always somewhere around the president. The press corps keeps a running record of the president’s movements. If Trump were in Key West for an secret briefing at JIATF-S, there’d have been some mention during the news cycle that he’d disappeared to parts unknown.

Third was the traffic. No rolling road closures between Boca Chica and JIATF-S. No unusual helicopters buzzing off Fort Zach, much less landing at NAS Key West. Either Trump hunkered in hiding in an unmarked SUV or rusted pickup (not his or the Secret Service’s style) or he wasn’t here.

By Sunday, the press pool reported Trump’s hour-by-hour movements. None of them anywhere near Key West, unless you count Mar-a-Lago. By Monday morning JIATF-S unequivocally said Trump was not here. By Monday afternoon, social media was like “nothing going on here” or whipping up theories to perpetuate the Trump-in-Key-West fallacy.

So where was the president Saturday? Playing golf with Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham at the Trump Graham Golf Classic at the Trump International Golf Club in Palm Beach. He went back again on Sunday. By the way, the senator is looking surprisingly svelte these days.

The AI-generated post

Were these taken Nov. 15?