Yesterday, about an hour after the freaky and not unscary 5.8 earthquake, it was beginning to look like there wouldn’t be any serious damage. So I went on Twitter, which was a stream of earthquake jokes, and made a simple joke about Keynesian stimulus: “Krugman says it wasn’t big enough.”
This was a riff off of Krugman’s argument we needed a fake alien invasion and the silver lining he saw in 9/11, that it could help the economy.
A few hours later, someone emailed me a link to a Google Plus (this is kind of Google’s version of Twitter) post under the name of Paul Krugman saying “People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.”
My first reaction was that this must be fake. Then I saw that all the other posts were fairly plain links to Krugman’s blog posts and columns. It had followers who were liberal economics-writer types. It didn’t seem like a parody account at all.
Then I went ahead and did on Twitter what (I hope) I would never do in a blog post or a column: I reported, without checking the validity or warning that it might be fake, that Krugman was really saying this: “Umm, Krugman says it wasn’t big enough. Seriously. He does. I’m not joking. Click on the link: http://bit.ly/oPjvU9 [Honestly. I swear.]”
But Krugman wasn’t saying that. This account was a fake, and the post was a hoax by a free-market blogger.
Dave Weigel calls this a fine example of “why fact-checking is important.” Yeah. Even on Twitter.
Paul Krugman is wrong on very very many things, but I was wrong to tweet without checking. So, I apologize to Krugman and everyone whom I led astray.
(On the upside, my joke yesterday is a joke again.)
