this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2024
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

It’s a great case of how tempting doubt is, and how people will automatically believe that accusations wouldn’t be made if something were not happening, so we have a 55% starting bias to believe “guilty.”

In college I was once the object of a salacious rumor that was 100% fabricated by someone and spread throughout my circles in school. By the time I heard about it, friends-of-friends and the entire faculty in my department had as well. Closer friends said things like “I never bothered to ask you about it because I figured it wasn’t true. And if it was true I didn’t care. Is it true?”

It was very frustrating how ready everyone was to believe it. People not very close to me ALL believed it. To this day I bet some people I know doubt whether I have just been lying this whole time to defend myself. But I know what I did and didn’t do, and I learned that people will absolutely get up one day and decide to manufacture something out of thin air and then spend energy spreading it around as if true.

I no longer think “well something must have happened if there’s this much hubbub about it…”