The Scrapbook remembers the days before social media and the Internet, and they weren’t marked by civility and well-informed dialogue. Even so, when someone in the pre-Internet era responded in print to an article or essay, he or she had usually read the article. Nowadays you just read the headline, if that, and sound off.

A few weeks ago, for instance, an item appeared on the Bloomberg news site headlined “Finland’s Basic Income Test Wasn’t Ambitious Enough.” Bloomberg’s Twitter account tweeted a link to the article with the teaser, “A lack of ambition is ending Finland’s experiment with a universal basic income.” The article suggested that Finland’s universal basic income, or UBI, wasn’t large enough to live on. But hundreds of thousands of Twitter users assumed the article was about UBI making people lazy or unambitious. Next came a million wiseacre comments based entirely on a misreading of a tweet.