Content is forever, misspellings and and mistakes included!

The Internet can be unforgiving. Let’s suppose we make a mistake or a simple misspelling in a social media post. Even if we correct it as quickly as possible, there is no guarantee that someone has already taken a screenshot of our original erroneous version. Sometimes, the original, broken version can be used against us or the company we represent.

Be aware of Social Media persistence.

This kind of issue happens daily in the American political arena. Sometimes, politicians react impulsively to an external event by posting some strong, unfiltered statement on social media. Within a few hours, as they realize it goes against their strategic interests, they regret posting it and delete it. But the post doesn’t really go away. All social media platforms keep a backup of all deleted posts for a long time. For example, a judge can issue a subpoena to the platform and force the release of the deleted post. In a different scenario, typical for famous political figures, a journalist could promptly take a screenshot of the post and save it for later use for an article, even if it becomes unavailable online.

Never share your documents’ history and metadata.

There are even more insidious issues when documents are involved, highlighting the need for vigilance. In a famous case a few years ago, a lawyer shared a Word document about a case with the opposing legal team. He forgot to clean up the document history and metadata before sharing the document, a standard and strongly recommended practice for sensitive documents. The receiving lawyer accidentally discovered he could access the document’s versions and metadata. By studying the sequence of changes and the rich metadata, he captured plenty of confidential information and could guess his opponent’s legal strategy. Eventually, he won the case, thus demonstrating the potential for misuse of digital tools and the need for careful handling of sensitive information.

To redact or not to redact?

In several cases, a US judge released a redacted PDF in which the sensitive names of the witnesses were redacted using an old version of the Adobe PDF editor. A journalist with some technical skills could access all the redacted information by simply copying the text from the PDF and pasting it into a regular text editor. This was possible because the redaction feature of Adobe PDF simply added a black box on top of the text to be redacted, hiding it without really removing it.

Fighting the caches

Sometimes, errors and misspellings persist online for a long time despite our efforts to fix the problem ASAP. The persistence of these mistakes online, often due to search engines and websites’ caches, can create serious issues, delaying the propagation of changes across the Internet for several hours or days. This highlights the urgency of immediate correction. Sadly, by the time we realize there is a problem, it’s already too late.

The inconvenience of CMS automation.

Many CMS automatically generate a blog post URL as a transliteration of the title. If the title includes a misspelling or error, the URL will automatically include the same misspelling or error.

The complexity of CMS and publishing tools generates other scenarios. Many fields of an online article are automatically generated based on the content we provide. While those automations are incredibly convenient, when we change some of the content, we can easily forget to double-check all the fields and attributes that were derived from the first version of our content. That includes structured data, image alt descriptions, and the value of several HTML meta tags, such as meta description and title. I have experienced this scenario several times when I discovered a misspelling or error in my blog post after having published an article on a blog. Many CMS automatically generate a blog post URL as a transliteration of the title. If the title includes a misspelling or error, the URL will automatically include the same misspelling or error. While it’s easy to edit an article title and fix the misspelling, if the article has already been shared on Social media or other channels, we can’t afford to change the URL without having to delete and recreate all the social media posts. There are ways to manage those situations, e.g., by creating a redirect from the faulty URL to the corrected URL, but they all require time and can have some negative SEO implications.

Internet unforgiveness example

Having directly experienced these issues, we can recognize them when we look at other people’s posts and social media shares. I’ll show you an example from some Italian news. You will not need to speak Italian to appreciate the example.

The original article

The original article appeared in the Italian version of the Huffington Post. It was about the North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un threatening several countries, including Italy, for activating new sanctions after North Korea was caught sending troops to Ukraine to help the Russians.

When I first noticed the article on Google News, the title looked very unusual. In fact, the article displayed on the news feed was titled (in Italian) “South Korea threatening Italy…” Nobody is really expecting South Korea to threaten Italy. The relationships between the two countries have always been amicable, and there was no reason for such a threat. I immediately realized that the author or the content managers at the Huffington Post made an evident and honest mistake.

As I clicked the link, I realized that the article’s title was about North Korea. It looked like the Huffington Post team corrected the mistake as soon as they discovered it. Still, the article was already in the Google News cache, and they will have to wait a while before the corrected title is propagated across the entire Google system. To check my hypothesis, I looked at the article URL, which was unmistakable proof that my theory was correct. The URL was clearly derived from the original title by some automation system. Because the title by mistake mentioned South Korea instead of North Korea, the URL fully reflects that, as you can see:

la_corea_del_sud_minaccia_anche_litalia_pagherete_un_prezzo_elevato-17493703/

I’m not mentioning this example to shame the Huffington Post. I’ve experienced the same problem multiple times myself, and I’m entirely sympathetic with them and the problems they face in managing their content.