In Reply: Delete Tweet, or Own Up to Your Mistakes? (Legal Insurrection)

In reply to the Legal Insurrection post To delete a tweet, or not to delete a tweet, that is the question, discussing whether or not to disappear tweets (and by extension, blog posts, etc) where one offers, repeats, or reacts to inaccurate infirmation or says something that turns out to be embarassing. (Follow the link above to the original post for more info.)

I can see both sides (especially in the case of traditional media outlets which, like it or don't, many trust more than bloggers), but I'm in the "leave it up and issue a correction tweet or two" camp. (In some instances when I've tweeted incorrect information (when I thought it was a serious enough error), I've also gone back and commented on my own tweet, correcting the incorrect info. Problem solved.)

While it's embarrassing to repeat, retweet, or react to a news report that later turns out to've been incorrect, I don't so much blame the person who repeated it as the source of the bad information. (Yeah, I hold the "traditional media" to a higher standard than I do bloggers and other social media users, too.)

Everyone makes mistakes, overreacts, or otherwise puts out things they later wish they hadn't (or at the very least, had handled differently). Owning up to being a human being with human foibles makes one more trustworthy in the long run.
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Posted September 18, 2013 at 12:07 pm