I’m reminded by the stories in 2016 on how the Pope has endorsed Donald Trump. Was it true? Not in the slightest. And yet these stories got millions of impressions. Enabling the spread of harmful, false, foreign-planted propaganda to spread like a cancer in our democracy is worth taking a moral stand over. Actors that propagate such falsehoods have earned their punishment.

Equivocation in this thread to NYTimes publishing on Trump tax returns boggles the mind, and shows the sorry state of 2020. It’s reminiscent of how Trump redefined “fake news”—a phenomena associated almost exclusively with right-wing falsehoods masquerading as news—to mean “facts that are so damning of me that I construct a reality-distortion field to blind my followers”. I am dismayed by how many commenters here seemingly abandon objective Truth and descend into the anarchy of textual equivocation.