The Unforgiving Internet Archives

The 11^th Doc­tor: Oh and delete your inter­net history

Doc­tor Who The Eleventh Hour 2008

Yes­ter­day when I woke up I found that once again the meme of “Zilla the non-​existent” had spread again.

As I have met Zilla in per­son, vis­ited her in the Hos­pi­tal and inter­viewed her the meme was quickly proven wrong.

To his credit, on see­ing this evi­dence the per­son in ques­tion apol­o­gized and deleted tweets to that effect as his honor demanded but the entire topic raises an inter­est­ing point con­cern­ing the net.

Every­one makes mis­takes and although search engines make the inter­net smaller it is impos­si­ble for one to see every­thing on it.

It is also true that even if you have cor­rected a mis­take your old posts might bite you back. Here is an example.

Pat Adkins has a blog I check occa­sion­ally called The Think­ing Americanist

He’s right on some things (guns) wrong on oth­ers Right to Work and he dis­likes my clos­est friend on the net, but on occa­sion shows real promise (trust not in princes…great post that).

Well he had a few things to say about my friend Zilla last year(all empha­sis mine)

In July:

….and yes, you are fak­ing your ill­ness, a well-​known and well respected pro­fes­sional blog­ger, who gets PAID to do write and blog told me so.

And Sep­tem­ber

The only thing I said about Zilla, was that I heard, from a good friend of mine; who is a Con­ser­v­a­tive, who gets paid rather well to blog; that Zilla was fak­ing her ill­ness. I know noth­ing about, nor have I ever said any­thing about her hus­band. If some­one is say­ing any­thing about her hus­band, it is not me at all. Fur­ther­more, I have never said any­thing about Zilla tak­ing a trip any­where either. If my friend was wrong and he could have very well been mis­in­formed, so be it. But I sim­ply told what I heard from what, I believe was a very good source.

Con­sid­er­ing Pat’s source was not only a friend but a “paid jour­nal­ist” one can cer­tainly see why he would believe it, after all I have sev­eral sources of my own that if they told me some­thing I would believe it at once.

How­ever after inter­view in the Hos­pi­tal with Zilla went up and he was made aware of it Pat did the right thing in style with a post I will repro­duce here in full.

A while back I wrote some stuff about a Blog­ger, that I had heard some stuff about.

Well, based upon what I have seen Here and Here, I pub­licly retract what I wrote about “Zilla, of the Resis­tance”

Now that I have actu­ally seen the video. I am con­vinced. To my defense, I just repeated what I was told.

Well, some­one was full of crap and I now, and rightly so, feel like the world’s great­est asshole.

If I had the extra hun­dred bucks; I would pop it in her tip jar and in Dan’s ; but I do not have it, so I can’t. But those who read this blog can.

Pub­lic retrac­tion, pub­lic apol­ogy mea culpa and tip jar request for Zilla. One can cer­tainly not fault Pat’s efforts he went above and beyond a sim­ple cor­rec­tion in a very hon­or­able way. He also proved him­self a loyal friend as he didn’t burn his pal who burned him.

He did how­ever, make a basic mis­take that I didn’t notice until today and I’ll wager he hasn’t noticed it either: He for­got to update the pre­vi­ous posts link­ing to the cor­rec­tion post.

Now per­haps he fig­ured reg­u­lar read­ers who saw the old posts he linked to would nat­u­rally see the new. he might have counted on the track­backs from the cor­rec­tion post to show up in com­ments or he might have been busy call­ing his friend for giv­ing him bad info mak­ing him look bad.

The prob­lem becomes if another blog­ger saw the old post and quoted and linked to them, those other blogs now become the pri­mary source for other peo­ple and search engines who see the old mis­take uncor­rected and take it from there.

The point being I sus­pect this kind of thing hap­pens all the time, it’s the nature of the inter­net and the blo­gos­phere, there is not much a per­son can do about it, whether it is a bad post or a porn video shot years before, it’s almost impos­si­ble to per­ma­nently cor­rect the record on the net, bad info is going to get out there and it is impos­si­ble to com­pletely purge it.

So take that as a les­son the next time you pre­pare to upload a photo, repeat some gos­sip or say some­thing that might embar­rass you or some­one else on the net. Take care and be aware.

Because no mat­ter what the Doc­tor says you sim­ply can’t delete your inter­net history.