Betteridge's Law of Headlines
An adage holding that any news headline ending in a question mark can be answered by the word "no" — because if the answer were yes, the publisher would have stated it as fact.
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Origin
Named after British technology journalist Ian Betteridge, who articulated the principle in a February 2009 blog post on his site Technovia. Reacting to a TechCrunch headline asking whether Last.fm had handed user data to the RIAA — the answer, buried in the article, was simply "no" — Betteridge wrote: "any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." The underlying observation is older; a 1991 compilation of Murphy's Law variants listed a similar rule as "Davis's Law."
Updated February 22, 2026