In the past few months, I’ve seen a few situations on social media that were odd to me.
First, a few months friend of mine shared a fake story related to George Floyd and his family. After he posted, it was shared a handful of times by other friends of his. Eventually someone pointed out that the story was false, and so he simply deleted his post.
This means that others that shared it still have no idea that it was fake, and the story continued to spread.
More recently, another friend of mine shared a fake “free vacation” story (a “like farm”) and she had gotten some good interaction on it. Some of her other friends had signed up for it as well, but when she found out it was fake, she simply deleted the post and left everyone else none the wiser.
Pride is tough to shake
In both of these cases, I think a bit of pride was the issue. They didn’t want a record of them having posted something wrong, and I get it. However, I feel like it would have been much more effective if they had simply edited their post to explain the issue and therefore help everyone become a smarter.
That said, I understand why they did what they did, and I can’t say for sure that I’d do it any differently.
I would hope that if that happens to me, I’ll be big enough to leave the fake news up with an explanation of what’s really happening, but we’ll see.
Have you ever posted something that you later found out wasn’t true? How did you handle it?
