Just after midday on Monday, the chair of the digital, culture, media and sport committee, Damian Collins MP, appeared at a tech panel on the sidelines of the Conservative party conference in Manchester.
Collins was sitting alongside Twitter and Facebook executives, trying to explain how the government would approach its long-awaited plans for a crackdown on the tech giants.
According to the MP, UK legislators must follow the lead of the German parliament and consider new laws that would slap tech companies with massive multimillion-pound fines if they don't take down extremist content.
"The sanction could be, well, in Germany it's heavy fines," Collins said.
"That's the framework we have to look at."
Any notion the government might get behind this lasted about 15 minutes.
Towards end of the panel, the secretary for digital, culture, media, and sport, Karen Bradley, stood up on the main conference floor to announce the arrival of the government's new "green paper" on internet safety.
BuzzFeed News spoke to a source familiar with Bradley's plans who said they had no idea what Collins was talking about, insisting big German-style fines simply weren't part of the government's approach.
How the government intends to approach regulating the tech industry has been a hot debate at the Conservative conference this week.
Politicians have openly spoken about the urgent need for Facebook, Google, and Twitter to do more to protect children from extremist content, as media lobbyists have worked behind the scenes on getting new tighter regulation.
And as night fell, home secretary Amber Rudd appeared at The Spectator's debate about internet freedom.
Rudd went even further, distancing the government from Collins' earlier idea of notifications and fines for Google and Facebook.
"Notifying and getting them to take it down is the least of our problems," Rudd said. "The problem is the scale of what goes up."
"I am concerned that a straightforward notification system takes them off the hook."
Collins has not returned questions about whether he still thinks the government should introduce fines for the tech industry.