There’s a moment in every crisis room I’ve been in — and I’ve been in more than a few — when someone opens a laptop, pulls up a dashboard of real-time social media data, and says something like: “We’re trending.” And then everyone looks at each other, because trending could mean anything. It could mean you’ve gone viral for doing something right. It could mean a false rumor is currently racing ahead of the truth at the speed of a share button. It could mean a journalist with a large following just posted something that is factually incorrect, emotionally charged, and already spreading fast. Data tells you that something is happening. Discernment tells you what to do about it. This is the distinction I’ve spent