I kind of have two answers here. The first is that I don’t make a character judgement on a person if they post something false due to a lack of fact-checking, if they own up to the mistake. In that sense I forgive them – I definitely don’t think less of them as a person.
But you brought up the point of credibility here and to me that is still an issue. Ever since the presidential election in our country, I have been doing a massive amount of research on a daily basis about healthcare politics and policy. I blog on the topic over on another site. I have made it my mission to understand what’s going on in healthcare and to help inform other people by compiling the info I find so they don’t have to drive themselves nuts on Google news every day like I’m doing.
The result is that I have very little bandwidth/sanity left to research other topics, and so I rely on some of my friends who are providing a similar service on their own passions – I have one friend who is doing research on LGBTQ rights, another on racial issues, etc. Because I don’t want to spend any more time reading about politics than I already am, I rely on these friends to provide me accurate summaries about what’s going on in other arenas. I use their information to inform my decisions about what I say when I call my Senators, etc. I need to be given accurate information because I don’t have it in me to do the additional fact-checking. I trust my friends to do this. If they screw up, it can break down my whole system.