Caution urged for everyone when gossiping online
The Internet has as many bad aspects as good ones, maybe even more.
Many of them are harmless, while still annoying. Some of them just cause unnecessary trouble.
It has become far too easy to criticize anyone or anything without providing any supporting evidence. Sometimes people doing that are 100 percent accurate, although I need to see evidence before I believe anything in that vein.
Recently, however, the Facebook group titled “Brazil Indiana Chatter” has been a hotbed for information and misinformation of all kinds.
I would only know this because I am a member of the group, although I rarely post anything except to provide links to our stories or other information being sought. (People, if you read just a few of the other posts you would know what time the parade started...........)
In a few recent incidents, people had heard something and asked a question. Two of those involved teachers allegedly walking out of local schools (which they didn’t) and someone who had escaped from custody in a local hospital going into a nearby convenience store (which did happen).
If anything like this that gets posted leads to the end of vandalism or the arrest of guilty people, then it’s worth the trouble. People need to be advised that if they read on that site someone asking a question about whether teachers had walked out of local schools — it does not mean that actually happened. It’s kind of like the telephone gamne in school that we used to play. A person on one side of the room whispered a sentence to someone else, and it got passed around the room until the final person said out loud what he/she had heard. Predictably, it was often very, very different from the original statement.
By far the most egregious inaccurate thing I’ve seen recently (maybe ever) involved an accident involving a Northview High School student. To read what was said in the group, once an alleged eyewitness said they were “putting someone in a body bag” that would understandably cause an uproar. Fortunately, no one actually died even though someone did have a seizure.
Asking a question about something you heard (even from your neighbor’s hairdresser’s brother-in-law) is mild in severity to that kind of behavior.
It’s probably the same people who drive to a subdivision when there is a house fire and block the efforts of first responders to put out the fire and help anyone who may have been injured.
A similar topic came up a couple of times last week when people were injured in various situations and everybody wanted to know “who was it?” Even though we often know, the Brazil Times will not release the names of anyone involved in such a situation until law enforcement has notified everyone in the family and has given us approval to release it.
Do we want to be “first” to get a story among nearby media? Of couse we do, but not at a cost of someone finding out first about such a death in our newspaper or on our website.
Last week, for example, our Ivy Jacobs was able to determine several hours before it was officially released which sheriff’s deputy had been shot in the incident in southern Clay County. Other media sources reported the information as soon as they heard it, and could not be sure all notifications had been made.
We are not doing that, and if it were your family member you would be thankful then.
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