To combat fake news, try to correct it when you see it

During the second week of September, I started to receive messages from former students, colleagues and friends letting me know that an old video of me was making the rounds as part of an online article about the top 10 colleges for writers in 2018. When I went to the link they'd included in their messages, I scrolled through the post, which listed the best colleges in reverse order. There's no indication how the list was determined.

Kenyon College clocked in as the ninth best college for writing and was accompanied by a video of one of its alumni, the writer John Green extolling the virtues of the place. At No. 6, Emory University, a video of Associate Professor Jericho Brown's TEDx Emory talk on the art of words leads the entry. And there, sure enough, right atop the entry for Emerson College, what the writer of the piece indicated was the No. 1 college for writing in the United States, was a 2 minute, 10 second video of me posted eight years ago to YouTube.

While John Green was mentioned in the write-up for Kenyon, neither Professor Brown nor I were in the write-ups for Emerson. It appeared that the writer or an editor had scoured the web for videos after the piece itself was written. Fair enough.

But while Professor Brown appears to still be on thefaculty of Emory, I left Emerson in August 2011, something that the writer and editor could easily have known if they'd checked the online directory or faculty listings for Emerson.

There's nothing I say in the video that I still don't believe. Emerson was a great place to teach and it still does have a unique writing, literature and publishing department. It's hardly likely that any reader of the piece would choose to attend Emerson because I happened to speak to them through their computer or smartphone as they read the list. It's equally unlikely that riches will befall me because any viewers mistakenly think I'm still affiliated with what the site deems to be the best in the land.

But to any viewer of the video, it appears I'm still on the faculty there, and that would be incorrect.

I didn't post the video nor did I write the article, but when we find information about us that isn't accurate, even if it presents us in a good light, do we have an obligation to try to correct it?

I believe it's the right thing to do. And I believe the writer or editor has the obligation to correct the error and ideally run a note indicating that the piece had been corrected.

The day after I saw the piece, almost a month ago now, I emailed the writer of the post thanking her for including Emerson on her top 10 list but letting her know that I hadn't taught at Emerson for going on eight years. I never heard back, and as I write this column, the video still remains on an article that's been shared 711 times.

If we want to read accurate information, then we have an obligation to let providers of that information know when they got something wrong. 

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues. 

Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net. 

Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin 

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