It racked up more than 2,000 “Likes” on Facebook and was tweeted roughly 1,000 times. The website that published it went on to refer to it as “The correction heard ’round the world.” Amanda Hess, the writer responsible for it, found herself fielding interview requests.

Clearly, this was no ordinary journalistic error-and-correction. Behold, the correction that literally launched a thousand tweets, courtesy of the D.C. local news website TBD.com:

“This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men.” (Emphasis, understandably, hers.)

The correction was later updated to note that the same post had also misattributed an image to “Wikipedia Commons” instead of “Wikimedia Commons.” But, really, who can focus at that point?

Yes, what a difference a letter can make: Suddenly an important piece of sex education information is transformed into a case for quarantine. Hess, who writes a blog about sex and gender for TBD, later explained she added the correction a few minutes after her post went live.

“I felt like because there was the possibility of me being embarrassed, I should put a correction on it,” she told Poynter.org, the website of the Poynter Institute, a U.S. journalism organization. “Also, I knew a couple of people had already seen it, and it’s one of those typos that could be an error if, in fact, taken literally.”

A very understated and factual analysis by Hess. Meanwhile, on the Internet, the correction was racking up comments on sites like Fark and Reddit, which aggregate amusing and notable news items.

“My spell chequer Czechs just fine, thank ewe,” offered one Reddit user.

“A Freudian slip is when you say one thing but you’re really thinking about amother,” said another.

As the correction rocketed around the web, the staff at TDB realized they had a hit on their hands, and senior community host Jeff Sonderman responded with a blog post.

“We all had a good chuckle here — the humor of the “me/men” mixup is as unmissable as it is unfortunate,” he wrote. “On some sites, the discussion was joined with the sort of innuendo and vile comments that anything about women, sex and/or race inevitably attracts online. That part is disappointing, but also predictable.”

Well, at least one Reddit user highlighted a point that seemed to get overshadowed by the hilarity: “I think the more shocking thing is the real statistic itself.”

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www.tbd.com/blogs/amanda-hess/2010/10/hiv-positive-black-gay-men-to-get-the-bayard-rustin-project-a-district-campaign-against-aids-2873.html

Craig Silverman is editor of RegretTheError.com and author of Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech.