Why Ashton Kutcher’s brain fart shouldn’t become the story

As you might know, Ashton Kutcher learned the hard way that you don’t tweet about major news stories without reading about them first. But being the guy with more followers than everyone else, his room for error is surprisingly small, leading to two things: 1) Heavy coverage of the story, including his own New York Post cover for some reason and 2) Kutcher giving up his ability to tweet on the fly to the social media arm of his company. Now, given that that’s a drastic move, some are trying to talk Kutcher off the new-media cliff, most notably Techcrunch’s Alexia Tsotsis:

I’ve never particularly been a fan of Kutcher, but I’m a pretty big fan of self-expression, even if you screw up big time. The most brilliant people are totally hated yo. Ashton, it’s not your fault that Twitter, and society, wasn’t prepared for such a disparate “one to many” ratio. So even if you were stupid and pressed send too soon, there is no Facebook or Twitter post you can’t recover from. So do it, please. You owe all those people who pressed ‘Follow’ under a certain pretense at least that.

But back up a second. Aren’t there, like, bigger fish to fry than this, considering what happened? For a TV star to outshine the worst scandal in college sports history on the eighth-largest paper in the country? That’s just wrong, friends. It distracts from the real issue here — which is what happened, and how to prevent it from happening again. Let’s focus on what happened. Not Ashton.