Who could have predicted that, when the news apocalypse finally came, it would say: “Man asks for Woolworths’ help to unite friend with ‘girl of his dreams’ spotted buying mushrooms in produce department”?

On Monday night, Gold Coast man Blake Mitchell Nicholls posted a photo to Woolworths’ Facebook page of a woman doing her shopping at the Q Super Centre at Mermaid Waters. He was at the supermarket with his friend Brok, “buying fresh produce to make butter chicken, when [Brok] glanced over at the girl of his dreams”.

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“For years, you’ve brought people together with your sensational service, fantastic products with a catchy theme song that’s kept me coming back, so now do what you do best and bring these two together,” he posted to the Facebook page.

“(Girl buying mushrooms if you read this, we will be in this section every night at 7:38pm until we meet again).”

You can just imagine the woman’s response: great, now I have to go somewhere else to buy my mushrooms.

Even if she’s checked out Brok’s profile pics and thinks he’s a bit of all right and isn’t dissuaded by his friends’ possibly habitual over-stepping of boundaries, taking a photo of a woman in public, at distance, without her consent or even her knowledge, then posting it to a public Facebook page with 880,900-plus followers is enormously misjudged at best and (I don’t know, I hope, because if it isn’t it should be) possibly criminal at worst.

“The internet is a reflection of society,” I often say in defence of a story about some trending hashtag. But that also means that the internet is full of failures of judgment and questionable content and men feeling ownership over a woman they quite know literally nothing about, apart from that she owns white shorts, eats mushrooms and was on the Gold Coast on Monday night.

Incredibly, there’s a precedent for this kind of story, though not all bids are as brash and bold as Brok and Blake’s . There was that time a “technology glitch” thwarted “Romeo” (he didn’t save Juliet’s number after she typed it into his phone – could it be, possibly, that she didn’t want him to have it?). Then there was the guy who set up a website devoted to finding a woman he “locked eyes with” on the New York subway.

Whether or not these stories have “happy endings” is sort of beside the point: women have a right to be in public spaces (and private ones!) without being co-opted into some bloke’s bid for “love” or likes.

There’s a reason why reporters who consider “internet culture” their beat are the most inclined to tweet along the lines of “burn it to the ground” or the little table-flip ASCII art (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ about our stomping ground, the internet. We’ve seen how bad it can get.

But there are more high-profile instances of stupidity online than a crab can wield a knife at – just because something has “gone viral” isn’t in and of itself reason to report on it. If media is going to cover internet culture, it must exercise at least as much judgment as it would with stories that occurred “offline”, a bar that admittedly varies from publication to publication.

And yet, here’s this incredibly generous description of Blake and Brok’s blatant bid for viral infamy, as it appeared on 9News.com.au on Wednesday morning: “Blake also took the opportunity to share a candid shot of the woman standing in front of shelves of mushrooms”.

It has even embedded a 10-second video – ripped from Snapchat, uploaded to its own player, and embedded– of Brok himself addressing the “mystery brunette” from the mushroom section two days after his post to the Woolworth’s page. “And you’re not here. I tried.”

The Huffington Post, the Gympie Times, Sushine Coast Daily, 4KQ693 Classic Hits, and MyGC.com.au also covered the story, if you can call two strangers shopping at the same supermarket at the same time a story. HuffPost at least headed it “supermarket creeper” – but still included the video and a screenshot of the post. Junkee and Pedestrian focused on its unsavouriness.

By Wednesday night, 9News.com.au had deleted their original tweet and amended the story and headline to reflect “backlash” – as though their coverage had played no part in it. In their second, straighter take, “the post has attracted mixed responses, varying from people calling the gesture ‘romantic’ to accusing the men of ‘stalking’”.

Blake and Brok are in the wrong, but they’re products of a culture that is still teaching men that disturbing breaches of privacy, even outright stalking, are “romantic” – and like most members of the Millennial generation they know how to market themselves on social media.

And there’s not much you can do about the 28,000 (twenty-eight thousand!) Facebook users who have liked their post to the Woolworths page, nor the nearly 3,000 (three thousand!) who have shared it.

I’m not here to shame Facebook page administrators for their attempts at #engagement. I mean, fair play to this comms manager: the supermarket’s response has drawn 22,100 likes, a quantified win in a metrics-driven field:

Hey Blake, whilst we’re more interested in matching your dear friend Brok with the perfect chick-en and bay leaf to create the curry of his dreams, we still think you’re a great wing-man! Next time tell Brok not to be chicken, just rice up and say hello! We hear love grows in the produce department.”

The comment concluded with a wink emoji and #HopeForBrok.

But it is disingenuous for media to report on the “backlash” to a post that’s “gone viral” as though their coverage of it doesn’t contribute to either. I am not Facebook friends with Brok or Blake, nor a regular at that Gold Coast shopping mall, nor a follower of Woolworths’ Facebook page: as such, I would have been blissfully unaware of this whole sorry saga had news sites not picked it up.

I’m under no illusion: when news media gives way to a bottomless, ever-refreshing feed of the Google results for “goes viral”, there’s no question there’ll be blood on my hands. I love internet culture, and have a more generous view than many of what constitutes “news”.

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Media should cover light as well as shade, and much of what’s dismissed as “clickbait” are just stories that people want to read, which is not in and of itself a bad thing.

But we journalists working the digital beat can exercise judgment and discretion and a sense of responsibility over how much of the internet we lend our somewhat quaint, old-media credibility, for howsoever long it may last.

Not every “Facebook user” is deserving of their 15 minutes of fame. Not every product prototype that goes viral on Tumblr makes a “trend”. Not every brand’s “perfect response” needs to be amplified. Some people are just very good at playing for favourites, and more power to them.

But if the media’s broadening the definition of “news” – which, ICYMI, I’m all in favour of – let’s not take it so far as to include every bozo’s idiotic bid for internet acclaim. Especially if it involves someone else without their knowledge, let alone their consent, and those retweets and likes and shares come at their expense.