When reports started coming through late last week of massacres in western Syria, it quickly made headline news.
What has emerged subsequently is that misinformation and fake news about the nature and scale of what was happening spread quickly at a time of uncertainty.
The media frenzy was further fuelled by fears that what had just unfolded unmasked the true face of the Hay’at Tahrir al Sham (HTS) government, until then popularly understood to be carrying out a slick public relations campaign to win support for the fledgling regime in the weeks and months since the sudden ouster of President Bashar al-Assad.
