Charles Manson died of natural causes recently, having lived behind bars since he was arrested and imprisoned since 1971. The world didn’t exactly mourn his loss, and many wished that the death penalty would have been carried out like it was initially supposed to after his conviction.

But, as is so common these days, many people read the headlines, saw the name Manson and did what they so often do—post all over social media without doing much research. And by “research” I mean even reading half the article itself or heading over to Wikipedia. It’s not difficult, but it’s proven too difficult for many as a surprising number of people have accidentally been mourning the apparent death of Marilyn Manson.

Marilyn Manson, whose name is actually Brian Hugh Warner, created the name based off of a twisted combination of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson.

Now, you might be thinking that this was a handful of tweets shot out by a couple of ignorant people. Think again. You don’t have to go far on Twitter to find people making mistakes, and for the purposes of this article I found plenty of examples in under 10 minutes.

It’s a funny indicator of how ignorant people can be, but it’s also quite troubling. Unlike a lot of our readers here at SOFREP, lots of people really care about celebrity news—enough to even write a post about it and tell everyone about how they’re thinking of them. And despite how much they “care,” they still cannot be bothered to read a single paragraph on the subject.

Now when we’re talking about foreign countries meddling in our country’s affairs, you can see just how susceptible a lot of these people are. With droves of bots pumping out tweets that are used to push one kind of agenda or the other, it really might not be so hard to have a significant impact on American citizens—especially when the agenda isn’t specific to one goal, but to simply fracture and divide us internally.

As everyone on SOFREP will encourage our readers to do: fact-check, do your own research and find multiple sources on everything. Personally, I am more skeptical of information that either happens to fuel my righteous indignation in some way, or if it magically aligns with my existing political beliefs. If it checks my box to rile me up, I triple check the information I’m reading.

The Manson mix-up is just plain old idiocy at work, but that idiocy is what can be used against us.

Article images courtesy of Twitter; featured images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons