Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writers’ Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Jennifer Lane, Jenni Enzor, Renee Scattergood, Rebecca Douglas, Lynn Bradshaw, and Melissa Maygrove.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

I have a problem.  I write a blog about space (or rather, I’m supposed to be writing a blog about space).  That requires a lot of research, and I do most of my research here on the Internet.  But it turns out that people tell lies on the Internet, or if they don’t lie outright, they tell half-truths, or quarter-truths, or one-eighth of the truth, or they offer alternative truths, or they misremember things they learned were true in grade school, or they dumb down the truth so much that it no longer resembles the truth.

Misinformation is everywhere.  Misinformation about space, science, and technology?  Check, check, and check.  Early in my blogging journey, I made a promise to myself: I promised that, to the very best of my abilities, I would not make the spread of misinformation worse.  I’m only one blogger, so there’s only so much I can do, but I promised I would not make this problem worse.  Not on my blog, not if I could help it!  So before I’d share a space fact on my blog or on social media, I’d stop and fact check it, and if I came across any space news that sounded super juicy, extra awesome, and extremely clickbait-worthy… I’d fact check that even harder.

But the sea of misinformation is growing deep, and wading through it is becoming increasingly arduous.  Fake research papers are getting harder for me to spot, and sources of information that I used to trust I now find questionable.  I succumbed briefly to the temptation of A.I., until I realized how it was slowly and subtly leading me astray.  I’m at the point now where I’m scared to post anything on my blog, because I’m not sure if my fact checking is enough, and I still don’t want to break my promise.  I still do not want to contribute to the further spread of misinformation.

So what am I going to do?  Fact check everything even harder than ever, I guess.  Do less research online and try to rely, instead, on books, science magazines, and peer-reviewed journals.  If I still have doubts about the topics I write about, I can talk about those doubts, and if I find out later that I made a mistake, I can always correct that mistake—but also, I can call more attention to my own mistakes, to make sure that you, dear reader, get the updated and corrected information.

I still love space.  Despite all the headaches my research process has caused me lately, I still love space, and I still want to share my love of space with others.  I do not want to spread misinformation.  That would be unacceptable.  But to stop writing about space, to stop blogging about space all together, out of fear that I might miss something?  Out of fear that I might make a mistake?  That would be unacceptable, too.