Please Be Careful What You Put on the Internet

[welsummerchicks]

I' ve also seen situations where either smart people got the record of their crime removed from a court web page by various means, or the record was simply lost or accidentally deleted. It is not so very difficult for a piece of data to just accidentally get deleted. My friend's ex was convicted of felony 4 reckless endangerment (bashed in a big window in a public building while drunk, a whole bunch of people were standing under it, so voila, a felony 4 conviction). When her lawyer went to the website to look it up, the record was not there. The ex had not even TRIED to get the data removed, it was just removed by accident by a fumble fingered clerk. It was very important for their divorce case, but it just wasn't there any more.

Then there are the cases where people lawyer up and cop to a much lesser charge or get their charges dismissed or expunged. It may come out looking like a much more minor offense or the person than it really was, or the person may be able to intimidate web site moderators to stop any discussion of their crime through threatening a lawsuit to the parent company etc.

In some cases an adoring fan club has kept an eagle eye on google and gone to any web forum that mentioned the case and effectively shut down any discussion that wasn't to their liking.

On the other side of the coin, people have been 'tried and convicted' on the internet too, such as when people assume a person commited a crime when he did not. There have been legitimate looking news stories that looked very true and simply were not. Or where the news was so completely distorted and twisted around that it looked like something entirely different from what it was, such as the MacDonald's coffee spill case, that was a classic.

A very typical news tactic is to 'dress up' the case so it seems to be a really heinous example of a problem people are up in arms about, such as this one ('a man's home is no longer his castle') or 'kids have no respect today' or 'people are always pressing frivolous lawsuits'. The other way is to make it seem like it's an entirely new and unique problem that just popped up.

For example, I do believe there are periodic outbreaks of Newcastle disease and have been for many, many years. Looking into this problem in detail, and getting some accurate history would be very interesting.

Discouragingly, it is often very easy to find 'on the other hand' sides of issues on the internet, but people simply DO NOT DO IT. They grab that exciting sounding news title and run with it.

You can't really depend on the internet for accurate information. Many internet journalists and most bloggers state emphatically that they don't have ANY journalistic responsibility and that they aren't about to develop any. Much internet journalism is far, far more bent on getting people excited and mad and visiting their website repeatedly, than on giving a very balanced, accurate view of both sides of a situation.

People have gotten so they think of it as the gospel, when it is not; it's much more of a 'mob rule' than anything else.

 

[aprophet]

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[welsummerchicks]

What I try to do is to look for multiple sources of information from different points of view.

Most people only read what is comfortable for them and what they agree with. I think that's a huge mistake. All one gets is more leaned toward one side.

I think when people were tested on current events issues, those who has as their major source of information, a newspaper or the evening news were the least well informed. The best informed were those who relied on NPR*! And those who were moderately well informed got a lot of news from John Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

*Yes yes I know the liberal media blah blah blah, but they do tend to look at issues from several perspectives.

 

[greyhorsewoman]

If you have children that use Facebook, PLEASE watch their pages

No kidding ... and not just to be sure about bullying, etc. .... this week a daughter of a friend of ours ranted on her Facebook page about how her dad was sick to death of his job and this area and that the family plans to move to Montanta as soon as they can sell their house. We know her dad and I don't think he would be pleased to know that his daughter broadcast that information. (Not even sure that is a serious thought, or just a 'blowing off steam' statement after a particularly difficult day or week.) We live in a rather 'small town' where somebody knows somebody who knows you. (The reason she is on my husband's 'friends list' is because of local horse activity ... so she is 'friends' with quite a number of other local adults involved in 4-H, etc.)​

 

[welsummerchicks]

You really, really have to watch out for news stories. People make a LOT of assumptions. For example, someone popular and admired is always 'being framed' and someone who is an ordinary person or a person of some disliked group or some less than respectable history is 'guilty as sin'. People assume so much from a few bare facts that might not even be reported correctly.

Another thing that happens is called 'bending the facts'. This means that every time something gets repeated it is slightly distorted. And that people put their own spin on the situation.

For example I heard in 2009, a prominent eventer announcer said a well known rider 'has been given the best tools, the best horses, and never quite gotten it together'. BOY. Talk about nasty. If he had caused her customers to migrate elsewhere and oit could be proven it would not go well for him.

Years ago, a gal I was working for, took her dog to the vet to be spayed. It was a long drive back from the vet's, and when she arrived instead of taking the dog carefully out of the car and putting it in the house, she let the dog loose, and it ran into the woods and did not come out. When they found the dog several days later, she was dead, with a distended belly.

She told me and everyone she knew, to tell everyone that the vet had botched the spaying, instead of admitting that she had let a just-operated on dog loose and it had been running, and most likely ruptured its stitches.

It's possible the dog may have had complications that started before she was taken home, but I am quite sure the vets and techs would have noticed a swollen belly and changed behavior on the dog. If I had posted something accusing the vet by name (or something that would easily lead to him being identified) it could have led to an awful lot of trouble.

The law says that slander and libel are only slander and libel if they are untrue and affect a person's life in a substantial way. For example, if you posted that someone was a convicted sex offender and because of that he did not get a job and wound up declaring bankruptcy, he could indeed take you to civil court.