In the spirit of “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence,” I try to start from a charitable interpretation of whatever anyone says
assuming good intentions even when the outcome was harmful; assuming mistakes rather than outright lying when a statement was untrue
but the weirdest thing about approaching the internet this way? is how surprised you’ll be at both the number of people who make genuine mistakes, and the number of people who deliberately lie and/or harm others for no reason but attention
you go into this thinking you’ll find a surprising truth about which one is more common
but honestly? I still am not sure which is more common… and the biggest surprise is how there’s somehow both more malice and more incompetence than I thought possible.
Plus, sometimes people do things where I honestly can’t tell what interpretation would be more malicious or more incompetent.
case in point: the viral screenshot of some guy posting on twitter that he saw a professor grading papers on a plane, and mentioning one of the failing students by name… and then someone with that name replying that this tweet was how they found out they failed
and then, if you read far enough down the notes on that post (after an angry mob first piling onto the first poster in the screenshot, and then piling onto someone else for not being convinced it was true)… then you find a link to a news article where someone interviewed the people involved
and (according to the article, which for all I know could be another layer of lies at this point!) …there were at least 2 people who replied (with recently changed screennames) to claim they were the failing student… both of whom admitted they did it as a joke…. and then the original poster refused to say whether his post was true or untrue, but just that he was grateful it gave people a laugh and brought in so much attention for his twitter account and the business he runs from there…
and at this point? I think I’d rather this was all deliberate lies? Because lying about this probably would cause less harm than posting some stranger’s failing grade on the internet?
but regardless… nearly everyone involved in that whole thing lessened my faith in humanity, just a little.