I woke up early this morning and, like most mornings, the first thing I did was check my phone for work messages, which mostly just means catching up on what fresh horrors have taken place in the United States while I've been asleep. The second thing I did was open Facebook to answer some Marketplace questions, where I was greeted with something that made me wonder whether I'd actually woken up at all.
I don't read The Independent, and am on record as being extremely scared of Lego Adults, so I have no idea why I was served that story. But seeing that image turn up on the social media page of a large, established newspaper stopped me dead in my tracks.
Deahas thed Star.
The more I looked over the words (or word, since only one of them is actually a word), the more I wondered: what the fuck happened here? We live in an age where job cuts in the media industry have become so commonplace that copy editors, once the backbone of newspapers the world over, are now an endangered species. So this could just be a typo on the image that slipped through because some underpaid social media person was having a bad day, or because the story's author had also been responsible for "socialing" the post and got sloppy in the middle of all the admin that requires (relatable, since we all post our own stories on social media here as well!).
Deahas thed Star.
That doesn't feel like a regular typo though. It's not an autocorrect either. You can see where the words "Death Star" are supposed to be, but the way it all falls apart in the middle--even the double space between "thed" and "Star"--makes it seem unlikely it's just a slip of the keyboard. Like it's so bad that even the most cursory glance--like I managed at 6am in bed!--could have seen something was wrong, if not while typing it then at least once it had been published. Say it out loud and it doesn't even sound like modern English, it sounds more like:
We also live in an age of AI slop, and an ownership class that is absolutely frothing at the mouth to automate as much of the media business as it can. Maybe this alphabetical casserole was instead a result of an AI-generated social media post shitting the bed in the middle of a sentence before recovering to nail the landing? But then is that really how it works? The tell-tale signs of AI writing are usually stuff like generic phrasing and a weird tone, not the structural collapse of a single word. And while The Independent has confirmed it uses AI as a publication (without specifying what for, exactly), it also says anything made by AI gets signed off by a human, and I refuse to believe anyone employed by a newspaper would miss something like “Deahas thed Star”.
So I'm at a loss. I, someone who has been writing, editing and being edited professionally for nearly two decades, have finally found a typo so bad it's making me question whether the word "typo" is even enough anymore. This isn't that. It's something else. Something beyond, that I think for any or all of the reasons above we could only see on Facebook, for a newspaper's social media post, in 2025.
I think the worst thing about it though, worse than the way "Deahas thed Star" will be stuck in my head like a thorn for the rest of the week, is the fact that at time of writing this story the original Facebook post has been live for 15 hours and hasn't been fixed. Which suggests that there aren't just mistakes being made on The Independent's production line, but that there's nobody answering the phone or even looking things over at the other end, either. If I'd made a typo that bad I'd have been harassed in my DMs almost instantly, mostly by my peers but also by well-meaning readers. Yet this thing, this unshaped clay lump of a sentence, looks like it's going to sit there for a day or more, maybe forever, leading more and more commenters like poor Gordon here to have to ask:
