It was a bad weekend for Armstrongs and Neils.
On Saturday, when news broke that the first astronaut to walk on the moon had died, social media sites blew up. Some people posted about how sad it was that such an amazing man - Neil Armstrong - had passed away.
But some people mourned the loss of Lance Armstrong. Or was it Billie Joe Armstrong? Or perhaps it was Neil Young or Neil Patrick Harris.
Wait, what?
I know Twitter kills multiple people with false trending topics, but all of this confusion is ridiculous.
Just going through Twitter and seeing people tweet things like "RIP Neil Armstrong. I say it's a suicide. It's not a coincidence that he died one day after being stripped of his Tour de France titles" or "RIP Neil Armstrong. You were so young! I loved How I Met Your Mother!" with all seriousness, is painful.
Those sincere tweets are almost as facepalm worthy as people around my age or older asking "Who is Neil Armstrong?"
No big deal, but he was sort of the first person to walk on the moon. It could amount to a big event in human history.
It wasn't just the uninformed masses on Twitter, though. NBC News, one of the first outlets to confirm the death, had the online headline "Astronaut Neil Young, first man to walk on moon, dies at age 82."
Perhaps the confusion came from Young's album "Harvest Moon," though that is hardly an excuse, and he isn't dead.
In a race to get information up before a competing media outlet, some places forgo copy editors. I certainly hope that no copy editor saw that headline and let it go up.
While it's important to get news out fast, it's still just as important to present the facts. If your attempt to be the first one to post is full of inaccuracies, it can be hard to stop the spread of the information. Not only that, but people will make fun of your mistakes and it's hard to climb back from deep embarrassment or a loss of trust.
The same goes for people who aren't journalists. No one wants to be the idiot tweeting out incorrect information.
At least, I hope not.
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