Hundreds of thousands of pages of the Justice Department’s files related to investigations of Jeffrey Epstein are set to be released Friday, and though all the files won’t be released just yet, this batch is sure to create a frenzy on social media when it drops.

The Epstein scandal is an important national story, and key questions about it remain unanswered. Hopefully these documents will shed some light on these questions. Valuable and even revelatory information could well be in the released files somewhere.

But as the hivemind of the internet grapples with this imminent release, one thing that’s sure to ensue is an onslaught of misleading, out of context, or outright wrong claims — many of which will go viral — about what these files show.

The way social media functions, this is inevitable. People will post anything they see that looks suspicious or damning, and the posts that express the most outrage will go the most viral. In some cases, this viral outrage may be merited; in others, it won’t.

The documented facts about Epstein — that he abused hundreds of young women and underage girls, while maintaining friendships with powerful and influential people — are damning. They’ve helped make the Epstein saga the mother of all conspiracy theories, with something for practically every political faction to obsess over. Any tidbit in the files that can conceivably be used to bolster the darkest theories will be so used.

The nature of investigatory files, though, is that they will include a ton of information that is hearsay, rumor, unproven, or false. This, my colleague Ian Millhiser recently wrote, is why the Department of Justice typically doesn’t release files like these — because they could smear people with false or unproven information, without giving them a chance to prove their innocence in a court of law.

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