What to Do When You're Wrong on the Internet
Yet again this week, I read a variant of the most frustrating phrase on the internet.
Every couple of months, I’ll see someone post a version of:
“Well, even if that wasn’t true, it could be true,”
or “Okay, he didn’t say that, but he definitely could have,”
or “Even if that didn’t happen, I could see it happening.”
I’ve written about or reposted things that later turned out to be false.
Most of us have.
It sucks.
It’s humiliating.
If we’re people of integrity, it requires an apology. Ownership of the mistake.
For some reason, it stings a little bit less if we cake our mea culpa with a little bit of “But even though I was wrong, it could have happened that way…”
But it didn’t happen that way.
Years ago, Ed Stetzer wrote an article (the original seems to have been taken down but here's a link) about the tendency of Christians to share fake news articles.
It’s one of those things that I didn’t notice before, but once I did, I couldn’t un-notice it.
It’s not always Christians that do it, but man, it’s Christians a lot.
I don’t know if that’s because Christians are so trusting, or because Christians so often try to be on the frontlines of the culture wars and try to pop off hot takes as quickly as possible.
Probably both.
In Stetzer’s article, he references the tendency for Christians to say “Even though this wasn’t true, it could have been true…” when apologizing for sharing false information.
Again, a tendency I never noticed until he pointed it out, and now I can’t un-notice it.
Anyway, I saw both happen again this week.
A fake story, and a “but it could have been true.”
It’s probably the thousandth time I’ve seen this kind of thing since I originally read the Stetzer article.
I’ve done my best in the last decade to do my due diligence before commenting on current events or sharing articles/posts/memes.
And I’ve done my best to own up when I’ve shared wrong information.
But I still notice that pull, that drive, that desire to defend myself.
“But…but….it could have been true. He would do that. Even though he didn’t, he absolutely could have…”
Yeah, but he didn’t David.
He didn’t.
You were wrong.
I think Stetzer’s message is even more important now.
I think in the last eleven years, we’ve become a lot more used to people 1. brazenly lying, and 2. arguing with the goal of “owning the libs/dunking on conservatives.”
We don’t need more lies and defensiveness.
It’s easy to share false stories. There’s a bajillion of them out there.
It’d probably do all of us well to practice, and to see other people practice, the art of confirming that any information we share is true, and admitting when we’ve shared misinformation,
without an “Okay…but he would do something like that though…”
Yeah, he might. But he didn’t.
You were wrong, David.
