2021, Eliot Higgins,We Are Bellingcat: Global Crime, Online Sleuths, and the Bold Future of News, page115:
a leaderless disinformation campaign, with claims leaping from conspiracy theorists to state propagandists to alternative-media outlets and back—an ecosystem I call theCounterfactual Community.
2014 September 15, Martin Gayford, “There's more to Ming than a vase [print version: 16 August 2014, pp. R6–R7]”, inThe Daily Telegraph (Review)[1], archived fromthe original on15 November 2014:
What would have happened if those great Chinese voyages [byZheng He] had continued? It's one of those questions incounter-factual history about which it is impossible to be sure.
2019 April 11, Marcel Theroux, “Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan review – intelligent mischief”, inThe Guardian[2], archived fromthe original on4 July 2019:
Thecounterfactual 1982 of the novel plays variations on our historical record and contains clear allusions to the present.
Just ascounterfactuals employ too much imagination to qualify as historical works, alternate history often labors under too great a load of artificial "facts" to take flight as fiction.
2010 September 1, Ross Douthat, “Iraq in the Long Run”, inThe New York Times[4], archived fromthe original on26 November 2022, retrieved15 July 2021:
We can spin out complicatedcounterfactuals that justify the Iraq invasion, and complicatedcounterfactuals that make it look even worse.
2015 December 3, Lee Drutman, “Here's the real reason we don't have gun reform”, inVox[5], archived fromthe original on5 February 2016:
The implicitcounterfactual — that these members would support gun control if not for the $1,000 they received from the NRA — seems unlikely to me.
2016 February 11, Noah Berlatsky, quoting Neal Roese, “'What if?': Why we can't get enough of counterfactual shows”, inThe Guardian[6], archived fromthe original on12 February 2016:
Roese also sayscounterfactuals can serve emotional purposes. You can think about how things could have been worse, and so feel better about yourself, and grateful for where you are.
2021 May 14, Dashiell Young-Saver, “The Math of Ending the Pandemic: Exponential Growth and Decay”, inThe New York Times[7],→ISSN, archived fromthe original on14 May 2021:
Imagine acounterfactual in which we started relaxing restrictions at an even earlier time, just as the cases began to trend downward.
counterfactual history on Wikipedia.Wikipedia