[twhb]

After thinking about this for a minute, I think the point wasn’t that people shouldn’t have fallen for this in particular, but to give everything a tint of uncertainty. It’s a pretty clear cut example of “no matter how believable it was, it can still be not even a little bit true”. In many contexts I’d call that a rather unproductive observation, but in the context of fake news, we have many people perceiving different realities built on a whole network of strong beliefs about what exists and what happened. Uncertainty about everything is probably actually exactly what’s needed to break free of a grip like that.

[ianai]

i.e. "the internet is full of lies" But that doesn't mean sources of truth do not exist. Sources of truth do exist, though, what is read online should be carefully considered. I mean, isn't that kind of the thinking around telling people to not clicking links in emails, text messages and generally stopping to ask whether a piece of information seems too outlandish to be true or too shocking? So yeah it's definitely felt like the internet is full of people who aren't "mature enough" to invest so heavily into the internet of late.