I wanted to see how people were responding to my piece for the Week, on how the presumption of the truth of all sexual assault accusations actually makes it harder for us to fight rape. I was particularly interested because the topic is so controversial. So as I often do, I plugged the link into the Twitter search bar. I found that there were several people from the #tcot crew sharing it, and yelling about it in an odd way. Getting conservatives mad about something I write is not at all uncommon for me, but there was something off about this particular instance. I also found that the automated Twitter feed that tweets out links to this blog had dozens of notifications. This is odd because, as a robot Twitter, it rarely gets a lot of mentions. Investigating these tweets made me more confused; a lot of people seemed to be yelling at me for saying things that they themselves were saying. I got a bunch of tweets saying stuff like “the FACTS matter,” “people who rely on evidence are Part of the Problem, right, progs?,” etc. This was weird; that’s precisely what my piece was arguing, that facts and evidence matter when it comes to rape allegations and acting otherwise does us no favors in the fight against rape. Why did so many people believe they were disagreeing with my piece when they weren’t?

I finally figured it out. Here’s the subhead of the piece, which crucially pops up in the Twitter preview for it: “A presumption of truth in every rape accusation is an impossible standard. And it’s doing real damage to the cause of fighting sexual assaults.”

That first sentence means “presuming every rape allegation to be true is an impossible standard.” But you could potentially misread it as saying “it doesn’t matter whether rape accusations are true or not.” Luckily, you could just, you know, read the actual piece and be corrected. But clearly, dozens of people got mad about it without bothering to read the piece at all. And not only did they get all worked up about a piece when they read nothing else but the headline and subhead, they felt so confident in their outrage that they commented on it on Twitter! Dozens of people!

What a world.