When will people learn that the Internet never forgets? Individuals can be forgiven for not realising this as most people never need to, but what about a national publisher? Shouldn’t it know better?

The Sunday Express is the latest in a long line of those suffering from the curse of the ‘removed post’ today – as well as increased interest in the story as a result. Yesterday, two Sunday Express journalists – David Jarvis and David Stephenson – put together an ‘inept wannabe-expose’ into the BBC’s use of Twitter (as broken down bit by bit on No Rock & Roll Fun), then promptly deleted it once news of the post’s inaccuracies hit Twitter.

Even if the post was out of date, or based on assumption rather than truth, the last thing the newspaper should have done was remove it. As is the norm for bloggers and many online media, an ‘update’ at the end of the post would have restored a bit of credibility in the paper’s ability to get its fact straight – as well as act as of acceptance of a mistake, but a willingness to fix it.

It’s no longer possible to sweep mistakes such as this under the rug (especially as you can still view the cache of the original post). Yet again this is another case of something that could have been fixed relatively painlessly, and appeared as a minor blip for a few embarrassed journalists that got something wrong. Instead, the fact that the original post has been deleted has eclipsed the story in the first place. This has happened so many times now, that the Sunday Express should really have learned from other people’s mistakes by now.