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Comment by sumeno | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that the obvious answer to the question of why rumors are spread more than truth is that spreading truth requires using enough effort to discover the truth and spreading rumors requires no such effort.

It takes someone two seconds to click share on some garbage article, it takes another person a minute or two of Googling to see if something is true or not. Laziness is going to win out with more people than effort.

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This is similar to a debate technique known as the "gish gallop". The idea is that you use your debate time to make many claims that are false or half-true which will take longer and can be more difficult to debunk than to simply state the claim. This is effective in formal debates where each debater's time is limited , so that your opponent is forced to spend most of their time defensively rather than advancing their own argument.

Not only does fact-checking take longer than blindly clicking "share", fact checkers are vastly outnumbered by blind-sharers. Of course the former is probably a big influence on the latter.

One of the things that really impresses me about Facebook lately is how often the first "suggested article" link under a bogus story is another story debunking it. If only more people paid attention...

> One of the things that really impresses me about Facebook lately is how often the first "suggested article" link under a bogus story is another story debunking it

I feel like Facebook should improve their related links system to inform a poster about them _before_ they post.

Most people don't suspect they're being lied to, they're no less likely to research a factual article than one that is complete bullshit. The simple reason rumors are shared more often is that rumors are usually more interesting.

To get caught up in, What is truth? isn't just a philosophical journey, it's often the first trap in another's scheme.

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