Four Tribunal Numbers, Each Right About Something Different

Four different headcounts have been circulating about the Rockstar employment tribunal in Glasgow. On 14 September a PA Media wire story reconciled them in two sentences, and 46 minutes later a rewrite of that same story put the sackings in the wrong year. The four numbers are 34, 31, 23 and "over 30". Every one of them is right about something different. The wire copy that fixed it REPORTED, byline Nick Forbes, Press Association Scotland. The earliest page timestamp obtainable for the copy is a JSON-LD datePublished of 2026-09-14T13:25:12+00:00. Two carriers of the same copy stamp it 2026-09-14T17:09:32Z, and the URL slugs on two of them end in the string 132512, matching the 13:25:12 move time. Verbatim: Some 34 people are believed to have been dismissed from Rockstar in October last year across the UK and Canada over what the company described as "the sharing of confidential company information". Twenty three of them are currently taking part in a employment tribunal, claiming they were unfairly dismissed for trade union activities. The grammatical slip in "a employment tribunal" is in the wire copy and is reproduced exactly. The four numbers, each right about a different thing NumberWhat it actually countsWhere it appears 34Total dismissed, 31 in the UK plus 3 in CanadaPA Media, 14 September. Also carried in Spanish on r/GTAVIhispano on 13 September as "34 extrabajadores" 31UK onlySTV News and Edinburgh Evening News headlines, and the headline carried into two console subreddits 23Currently taking part in the tribunal as claimantsPA Media, and the Newsquest rewrite which misreads it as the number sacked "over 30"LooseCommunity posting on 10 September The split is corroborated from a contemporaneous source. TechRadar's report of 16 December 2025, byline Demi Williams, records that Rockstar fired 31 in the UK and three in Canada in October. 31 plus 3 equals 34, of whom 23 are litigating, and the union's public "31" is the UK-only figure. That closes this desk's four-headcounts thread, which we opened on 11 September at our piece attributing each of the four. Then a rewrite moved the sackings two years CONFIRMED by two researchers independently, from the page HTML. A Newsquest rewrite, byline Amy Myles, credited to the Glasgow Times and syndicated by Yahoo UK, carries a JSON-LD datePublished of 2026-09-14T14:11:01Z. Verbatim: The employee is one of 23 former staff members taking action against the gaming giant after they were sacked in October 2023 for what Rockstar described as "the sharing of confidential company information." And again, further down the same piece: the claimants "were questioned about emails from Rockstar's vice president of HR, Rob Spampinato, which they posted to a Discord group in October 2023." The Yahoo URL slug ends 141101552, which encodes 14:11:01. Two errors sit in that copy. It takes 23, the number of claimants, and reports it as the number of people sacked. And it dates both the dismissals and the Discord posts to October 2023, two years out. PA's copy on the same emails says "in October last year", which from 14 September 2026 is October 2025. The October 2025 date is corroborated three ways: the IWGB's own hearing notice says the workers were dismissed in October 2025, AFP reports that "31 employees were dismissed in Britain in October 2025", and the TechRadar piece of December 2025 places the firings in October of that year. The twist, and it is the best part: the error did not reach the fans COMMUNITY, and it runs the opposite way to what you would expect. A search of the week's community posting found no post carrying "October 2023" as the dismissal date. What the community is circulating instead is the correct year, from better sources: r/TwoBestFriendsPlay, 2026-09-10T21:17:32Z, citing a Bluesky thread rather than a wire, verbatim: "The fired workers claim there were 340 people in the union Discord when they were eliminated on October 30, 2025." r/TwoBestFriendsPlay, 2026-09-11T23:55:54Z, quoting Rock Paper Shotgun verbatim: "On 7th October 2025, they allegedly informed Kinlock that the union were 12 members away from the statutory threshold for recognition". r/GTAVIhispano, 2026-09-13T18:00:28Z, in Spanish, carrying both "34 extrabajadores" and the 10 September start date. Both correct. Most of that predates the 14:11Z rewrite. The community versions are dated 10 to 14 September and sourced to Rock Paper Shotgun, the BBC, Dexerto, gamesindustry.biz and a Bluesky thread, all of which have 2025. No Yahoo or Glasgow Times link appeared in any community result fetched. Where the error did spread, stated narrowly ONE OBSERVATION, BY ONE TOOL, ON ONE DATE, AND WE ARE NOT GENERALISING IT. When our community researcher searched the open web for this story at 03:33Z on 15 September, the summary returned by their own search tool read, verbatim: "23 former staff members are taking action against Rockstar Games after they were sacked in October 2023...". It had taken the Newsquest figure and the Newsquest error together and restated both as fact. That is a single observation of a single tool on a single date. It is not a claim about automated summaries at large, it is not a claim about any named product, and it should not be read as one. It is recorded because it is the only place on any surface this desk checked where the wrong year was being repeated as fact, and because it is the opposite of the propagation path anyone would have predicted. The likely origin of the wrong year REPORTED, and it is a plausible conflation rather than an invention. Dexerto's coverage correctly describes a 2023 office petition: workers who signed it "were later placed under closer monitoring". A 2023 petition is a real fact in this case and Dexerto labels it correctly as a petition, not a dismissal. A rewrite compressing that alongside the October 2025 dismissals produces exactly the sentence Newsquest printed. Two more pairs worth having straight Edinburgh against Glasgow. STV News and the Edinburgh Evening News both write about the sackings of "31 Edinburgh workers", while the tribunal sits in Glasgow. Both are defensible. Rockstar North is in Edinburgh and the hearing is listed in Glasgow at the Glasgow Tribunal Centre, 3 Atlantic Quay, 20 York Street. It is exactly the kind of pair that breeds a confident wrong correction later, so it is flagged here rather than left to run. The end date is disputed by one day. AFP reports the hearing "will run from Sept. 10 to Oct. 16" and attributes those dates to the union and to Rockstar's lawyers. The IWGB's own hearing notice says Thursday, September 10 to Thursday, October 15, 2026, 10am to 4pm Monday to Friday, excluding the 28 September bank holiday. 15 October 2026 is a Thursday. 16 October is a Friday. Either the listing moved or one of them is a day out, and outlets have propagated "until October 16" without attribution. The "Bloomberg" tribunal story is AFP copy CONFIRMED. Several outlets have cited the BNN Bloomberg page as Bloomberg reporting. Its JSON-LD carries author = "AFP Staff" and datePublished = 2026-09-07T19:50:29.37Z, under the og:title "'Grand Theft Auto VI' makers face employment case in Scotland over sackings". It is AFP copy carried by a Bloomberg-branded Canadian site. AFP gets two things right that the aggregators around it get wrong: the studio is in Edinburgh and the tribunal is in Glasgow. The case reference is 4104294/2025, Garland and Others against Rockstar. Method limits The Glasgow Times original was never fetched directly. Both researchers read the Newsquest copy through its Yahoo syndication, so the 14:11:01Z timestamp is Yahoo's stamp on Newsquest copy. The two-year date error stands regardless of ordering, but if the Glasgow Times published its own version before 13:25:12Z then the publication order changes. The official Scottish tribunal listing for 4104294/2025 was not obtained, so the 15 against 16 October discrepancy is unresolved. The gov.uk employment tribunal register publishes issued judgments rather than hearing listings, and a hearing that opened on 10 September would not be expected to appear there yet. That register returns three Rockstar hits and none of them is this case. The Shropshire Star, which carries the PA copy, returned 403 at 6,045 bytes behind a Cloudflare interstitial. Two other carriers of the same copy were used instead. Reddit gives this desk no score and no comment count on any working surface, so no engagement figure appears anywhere in this piece and every community item above is a dated post rather than a measured one. What is and is not established REPORTED, PA Media, verbatim: 34 believed dismissed across the UK and Canada, 23 of them currently taking part in the tribunal. CONFIRMED: the reconciliation is 31 UK plus 3 Canada equals 34 dismissed, 23 of whom are claimants, with "over 30" a loose rendering of the same total. CONFIRMED: a Newsquest rewrite timestamped 14:11:01Z on 14 September dates the dismissals and the Discord posts to October 2023. The dismissals were in October 2025, corroborated by the union's own notice, by AFP and by contemporaneous December 2025 reporting. COMMUNITY: no community post found this week carries the wrong year. The fan-facing versions cite Rock Paper Shotgun, the BBC, Dexerto, gamesindustry.biz and Bluesky, and most of them predate the rewrite. ONE OBSERVATION, LABELLED AS SUCH: an automated web-search summary returned the wrong year as fact at 03:33Z on 15 September. That is one tool on one date and it is not generalised here. DISPUTED: the hearing end date, 16 October per AFP against 15 October per the IWGB's own listing. CONFIRMED: the BNN Bloomberg tribunal story is bylined AFP Staff. Explicitly not claimed: anything about the merits of the case, or about any material the claimants are said to have shared. Nothing of that kind was examined by anyone on this desk. Every document and dated filing on the tribunal thread is logged on the wiki, with the rest of today's reporting on the news desk. The servers list and the leaderboards are open for the next 65 days.