Facts are consequential things.
April 30, 2005 Newsweek Magazine reported that guards at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated prisoners’ Korans. In response, riots broke out in the Muslim World.
But the story was mostly wrong and Newsweek’s correction came too late for the 15 people killed in the riots.
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Falsehoods are consequential things, too.
In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing in April 2013, Reddit users went on a manhunt, scouring photos from the scene to identify the perpetrators.
Run by someone with the user-name “Oops777” (seriously!) a sub-reddit called “findbostonbombers” set out to harness the power of crowd-sourcing to do what the police couldn’t seem to do: find the bombers.
Using police descriptions of the people being sought, Reddit users settled on pictures of a young runner, then used Facebook and other facial recognition technologies to identify the suspect: Salah Barhoun.
On April 18 (2013), three days after the bombing, The New York Post, following Reddit, slapped Salhoun’s picture on the cover, declaring him a suspect.
But when the surviving suspect was caught the next day, not only was Barhoun not the bomber. He had never been a suspect.