Who said i mourn the loss of thousands of precious

An open question regarding information and the web, is whether technologies like social media and the Internet in general increase or decrease the prevalence of false information.

True statements will be repeated and spread, while false statements will be recognized by a great enough number of people to squelch them. On the other hand, we know that systems like this with strong positive feedbacks can converge to suboptimal solutions.

If you think of retweeting some piece of information as like casting a vote that it is true, we might expect information cascades of the sort described theoretically by Bikhchandani et al. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that. So at this point I had more of a quote More red flags. What we all begin to notice was that all the online entries of this quote were very young, even for the Internets.

At this point, none of us had any confidence that the quote was genuine, but I still wanted to know more. So I began to parse the quote and search for smaller bits of it. It was then I discovered this quote from a collection of Dr. King's sermons :. It was Dovey who wrote that eloquent first sentence. She put it on her Facebook page and linked to it on Twitter. Its biggest boost appeared to come from entertainer Penn Jillette, who tweeted the incorrect quote to his 1.

He would later correct it. But not before the lightning-fast world of the Internet got wind of the misquote. Quotation accuracy fiends like myself are used to seeing misinformation accepted as fact. But the Dovey tale is a heartening example of Internet mechanisms working speedily and effectively to counter the mistake. This message will appear once per week unless you renew or log out. Skip to main content Skip to main menu Skip to search Skip to footer.

Search for:. Monitor Daily Current Issue. A Christian Science Perspective. Monitor Movie Guide. Monitor Daily. Photos of the Week. Martin Luther King himself couldn't have put it better when he said, 'Don't believe everything you read on the Internet.

If you were online Monday, there's a decent chance you spotted this quote: "I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Just one problem: There's no evidence that Martin Luther King ever said such a thing. Megan McArdle , a blogger at the Atlantic, tracked the original quote down to Jessica Dovey , a recent Penn State grad living in Kobe, Japan , who posted this as her Facebook status : I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.

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