Social media websites are notorious for letting inaccurate information spread without correction. It’s often unintentional; someone makes a mistake that gets widely repeated, or a joke is taken as a serious claim. This morning I found I was part of this, as people boosted and favorited (terms vary with the platform) a mistake which I made.

I run a feed of news for filkers, appropriately called “Filk News” (on Bluesky and on Mastodon). On Sunday, March 9, the USA and Canada moved to Daylight Saving Time, but Europe doesn’t till later. There are several online filk gatherings with international attendance, so this could confuse people about when meetings start in their time zone. For example, Eurofilk is 6 PM Central European Time, which normally makes it noon US Eastern Time, but for three weeks it’s 1 PM Eastern Time.

I mentioned this on Filk News but got the direction wrong, telling everyone that Americans would need to be an hour earlier for European events, and Europeans would have an extra hour to get to American ones. Several people reposted, boosted, or “liked” my post on both platforms. No one corrected me. Today there’s an online event in the UK, and I wrote a post about it as usual. I rechecked the time difference before submitting it and realized I’d gotten it wrong earlier! The time difference between Boston and London is now four hours, not six! I deleted my earlier post and added an apology for the error.

If people can’t spot and mention an error on that straightforward a matter, are they going to catch things like misquotes of world leaders? Sorry for making the error, but people who spread information which I provide share some of the responsibility.

I hope I didn’t make anyone miss an important meeting.