Yesterday, social media was abuzz with the news that a man and his friend were kicked off a Delta flight from London to New York City for simply speaking Arabic. A short video filmed by one of them as they are escorted off the plane depicts him visibly and audibly upset, whilst several passengers can be seen waving them goodbye in the background.

As is now the norm, the video quickly birthed a viral campaign and, of course, the inevitable hashtag. Within hours, #boycottdelta was a trending topic worldwide on Twitter.

People were outraged. For them, what had happened was obvious, perhaps even predictable. The story fit the narrative. This was yet another instance of racism in a Trump-is-President world, and people were determined to fight it through their laptops and smartphones.

The Delta Airlines Facebook page was inundated with angry comments in an outrage blitz – coinciding with a tsunami of one-star reviews. Besieged, the airline issued their first public statement, asking the public not to jump to conclusions.

What caught my eye reading Delta’s statement was in the final paragraph:

“…when the flight lands this afternoon.”

That’s right. At the time of this statement being released, which was after hours of social media outrage, the flight the two men were kicked off of was still making its way across the Atlantic. The dozens of alleged racists who complained about the two men, other passengers who witnessed the ordeal, as well as the airline staff who made the decision to have the two men taken off the plane were all still cruising at 36,000 feet – yet to tell their side of the story.

In other words, the truth about what had happened was, both literally and figuratively, still up in the air.

We wouldn’t want our courts convicting someone before their side of their story has also been heard, or for our police to arrest someone without first establishing grounds for doing so. Yet #boycottdelta had already hundreds of thousands of retweets and was trending worldwide, before the flight had even landed. It often seems as if social media today has not only shortened our attention spans with regards to videos and news, but also our commitment to the truth.

A simple Google search reveals that the man whose video sparked the controversy is Adam Saleh, a popular Youtube personality. A quick look-up of his Youtube channel shows this:

Saleh certainly seems aware of the potential for his actions to be provocative – he himself calls them “pranks” and “experiments”. This makes the shock he displays in the video as he is being escorted off the flight somewhat baffling: he seems utterly aghast that his speaking Arabic has provoked people, and yet his past videos show that he knows full well this could happen. In fact, the entertainment value of those videos rely on that happening.

Furthermore, it’s emerged that Saleh has in the past created fake videos allegedly depicting anti-Muslim discrimination. One in 2014, called “Racial Profiling Experiment”, shows a NYPD officer intervening in a fight involving Saleh only when he is wearing Arab clothing, and not when he’s wearing more western-style clothes. Though the video was exposed as a fake, it wasn’t before The Huffington Post and other mainstream news outlets had reported the video as if it was real.

Finally, a few hours later, Delta issued its second public statement, revealing the results of its investigation:

Obviously, it is the airline and its passengers’ word against Saleh’s. However, though there is much that we cannot know for sure, what is certain is that Saleh will benefit from the increased publicity this ordeal has generated. This and his history of trivialising religious and racial differences for the sake of entertainment cannot be ignored in judgments about what happened.

You might ask: why is any of this important?

It is important because it shows that in an age of social media and fake news, we have to make sure that we aren’t merely recipients of news but also the guardians of real news i.e. the truth.

In 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, MO – one of the fatal incidents that propelled the Black Lives Matter movement into the national spotlight. It was here where the “hands up, don’t shoot” narrative first emerged, after initial witness accounts told of how Brown had his hands in the air, surrendering, pleading for mercy before being killed. The phrase and the gesture became symbolic of police brutality against the black community and became the unofficial slogan of the then-nascent social movement. However, a subsequent, definitive Department of Justice report into the killing found that there was no evidence Brown had his arms up or had surrendered. The slogan has since been said to be “built on a lie”, and has undoubtedly damaged the credibility of the BLM movement.

Though I admit I do not know for sure what in fact transpired that led the two men to be kicked off the flight, I am alarmed by the rapid pace by which people were mobilised on social media to create an internet campaign based, frankly, on incomplete information. This is important because the problem of anti-Muslim bigotry is a real one, especially the discrimination Muslim air travellers face (there is even a special phrase for this: Flying While Muslim).

When people are quick to jump to conclusions, especially when the underpinning facts are shaky or unestablished, all it does is reduce the credibility of future claims of discrimination, even if they are true.

If it is revealed that yesterday’s story is in reality another hoax concocted by Saleh in the pursuit of publicity and to grow his online following, which seems increasingly likely, the victims of his deceit will not just be him and his friend, but also future Muslim travellers who will have a more arduous task having their stories of discrimination believed. This is why we must be more careful with our outrage, and be diligent and rigorous in ensuring that our outrage is always backed up by the facts. Only then will we be in the best position to rectify real cases of discrimination.