My dog died.

No, he didn’t. But if I lived halfway across the world from you, how would you know? Back up a second, how would you even know if I really have a dog or not?

Now, let’s say I don’t live in America, but in Iraq. What’s to prevent me from posting complete lies about what’s going on there? How would people know? People link to the lies, propagate them, and their opponents arguments are thwarted by lies.

And so what if the truth comes out. A lie can go around the world before the truth can even get its boots on. The damage is already done.

Alright, stop thinking small. Instead of a weblog, let’s make a newspaper. We brag about the world’s new interconnectedness, but, really, how worldly are people? How many of you have been to other countries? To other hemispheres? To other states?

How do you really know what’s going on in other places? It’s less true than in the past, but it’s still possible to control what people think about places that are far away.

Going back to the newspaper, let’s make one that is full of lies. About people that never existed. About natural disasters that never happened. Who’s stopping us? The freedom of speech includes the freedom to lie.

Okay, there are lies against libel and defaming someone’s character, but who says we have to do that? There is no law against misinformation.

Make the paper internally inconsistent. How many people look at the corrections in a newspaper? Correct typos that never occured.

Create a newspaper of lies and see if the truth will ever catch up.

EDIT: Addendum: And what does the average person know of science? Not much… case in point: evolution, global climate change. Producing fake science stories that reference fake studies. What can anyone do about it?