Are we living in a post-truth world, or do states behave as if facts matter? Some scholars have suggested that our current digital age facilitates the use of evidence to contest states and thereby undermine their credibility. However, others have suggested that we are living in a post-truth world where facts have lost their significance. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to investigate and try to understand how states behave when they are contested in the digital age. I will do this by analysing America's rhetorical strategies following the 2017 Al Jinah Airstrike in Syria, where their version of the event was contested by the investigative NGO Bellingcat. As such, this paper analyses the 2017 Al-Jinah rhetorical contestation process with contemporary perspectives grounded in the debates on how evidence and truth are valued in the digital age. This was done by applying the method of rhetorical criticism to analyse five different texts from both sides of the contest. Previous literature on strategic narratives and contestation processes has discussed the significance of evidence for the credibility of narratives, however, I argue that they have missed applying such perspectives in a comprehensive manner together with notions of the post-truth, especially on rhetorical contestation processes at the event-level. This paper found that the US acknowledged and modified their behaviour to some extent in the face of evidence provided by Bellingcat. However, the Americans also refuted credible evidence of killing dozens of civilians. As such, the findings supported both the notion that evidence matters for state behaviour in the digital age, while also supporting a more post-truth perspective where states can/are ignoring evidence as they please. Nonetheless, by applying these perspectives, I argue that our understanding of how and why states may behave the way they do when contested in the digital age is enhanced.