Welcome to the Wild West of Online Information
Take Lisa, a 32-year-old project manager in Chicago, for example. Before she even gets out of bed at 7 a.m., she’s already consumed three conflicting pieces of health advice in the 10 minutes she spent scrolling through her feeds. First, a WeChat official account post claims that walking 8,000 steps a day wreaks havoc on your knee cartilage, citing a “new study from a top Chinese hospital.” Next, a TikTok fitness influencer she follows demonstrates his 10,000-step daily routine, insisting that anything less is “lazy and will make you gain 20 pounds by the end of the year.” Then a former college classmate posts a Facebook article about a Harvard study that says 3,000 steps a day is the sweet spot for longevity, with zero risk of joint damage. By the time she’s brewed her coffee, her work group chat has blown up with a forwarded message from a “reliable source” claiming that step counts don’t matter at all if you’re overweight—you should only walk until you’re slightly out of breath. Lisa stares at her phone, sighs, and decides to just stay in bed for another 10 minutes. It’s easier than trying to figure out which of these five pieces of advice is actually true.
If you’re reading this and nodding so hard your neck hurts, you’re not alone. This kind of chaotic, contradictory information overload isn’t just a minor annoyance—it’s the default state of how we consume information in the 2020s, and it’s a massive shift from how most of us got our news just 20 years ago. Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane to put how wild this shift really is into perspective.
Back in 2004, if you wanted to know what was happening in the world, you had three options: turn on one of the three major network TV channels (ABC, CBS, NBC, if you were in the U.S.), read the local newspaper, or listen to the radio on your commute. All of these sources had professional journalists, editors, and fact-checkers whose entire job was to make sure the information they put out was accurate (or at least, as accurate as humanly possible before deadline). Sure, they had biases—every media outlet does—but at least the information you got had passed through multiple layers of human review before it hit your eyeballs. If a TV station reported that a politician had taken a bribe, they had to have documents, on-the-record sources, and a legal team sign off on the story before it aired. The cost of publishing false information was high: lawsuits, lost credibility, lost viewers. So while the news wasn’t always perfect, the baseline for what counted as “acceptable” information was a lot higher than it is today.
Then came the mid-2000s, and the rise of the first wave of social media: MySpace, then Facebook, then Twitter. Suddenly, anyone with an internet connection could publish information to a global audience for free. The first big test of this new, unregulated information ecosystem came in 2008, during the Wenchuan earthquake in China. For the first time, ordinary citizens on the ground were posting photos and updates to Twitter and Weibo faster than any professional journalist could get to the scene. It was a miracle: people whose families were trapped in the rubble could let the outside world know they were alive, and rescue teams could get real-time updates on which areas needed help most. But it also came with a downside: within hours, false rumors were spreading just as fast—claims that a major dam had burst, that tens of thousands more people had died than official counts showed, that looters were roaming the streets. For the first time, ordinary people had to figure out for themselves what was true and what wasn’t, without the buffer of professional editorial review.
That was just a warm-up. The real chaos kicked off around 2016, when algorithm-driven short-form video platforms like TikTok (called Douyin in China) and Instagram Reels became mainstream. This was the true paradigm shift: before this, social media was still mostly “pull” content—you had to actively go look for information, follow accounts, join groups. Algorithm-driven feeds flipped that to “push” content: the platform decides what you see, based on what it thinks will keep you scrolling. And the metric it uses to decide what to push isn’t “accuracy” or “public value.” It’s “engagement”: how long you stay on a video, whether you like it, comment on it, share it, or watch it all the way through.
This might sound like a minor tweak to how you get your information, but it’s actually a fundamental rewrite of the entire information ecosystem. To understand why, let’s break down the three core structural changes that have turned the internet into the Wild West of information we’re all navigating today.
---
1.1 The Zero-Cost Information Factory: Anyone Can Publish Anything, For Free
Twenty years ago, if you wanted to reach a million people with a piece of information, you needed a lot of resources: a printing press for a newspaper, a broadcast tower for TV, a team of reporters and editors to verify your content. The cost of entry was high, which meant that the people publishing information had skin in the game: if they published a lie, they’d lose their job, their reputation, their business.
Today? All you need is a $200 smartphone and a free social media account. The cost of publishing is zero. And the cost of publishing a lie? Practically zero too. Sure, you might get banned from a platform if you’re caught, but you can just make a new account in 2 minutes, and the lie you posted will have already spread to millions of people before the platform even notices it exists.
This democratization of publishing has done a lot of good: it’s given a voice to marginalized groups that were ignored by traditional media, it’s exposed corruption that would have otherwise stayed hidden, it’s let ordinary people document human rights abuses and natural disasters in real time. But it’s also opened the floodgates for bullshit, on a scale we’ve never seen before.
Remember that viral rumor a few years back that KFC was selling chicken with 6 wings and 8 legs? The company’s official response was perfect: “If we could breed chickens with 6 wings, we’d win the Nobel Prize in Agriculture. We wouldn’t be wasting them on fried chicken.” But by the time they responded, the rumor had already spread to over 100 million people, and many still believe it to this day. The person who started it? A random guy in a small town in China who made a fake post for fun, no cost, no consequences, just a few minutes of his time.
And it’s not just random pranksters anymore. The rise of AI generative tools has made it possible for anyone to create fake text, fake images, fake audio, and fake video in seconds, for free. In 2023, during the Maui wildfires in Hawaii, a viral video claiming the fires were caused by a “directed energy weapon” spread across TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter, racking up over 200 million views in 48 hours. The video was generated using Midjourney, an AI image generator, and edited together with unrelated footage of military tests. It took independent fact-checkers days to debunk it, and by that time, millions of people had already shared it, and many still believe it’s true. According to a 2023 report from the EU’s Disinformation Observatory, AI-generated false content now makes up more than 20% of all false information circulating online, up from less than 5% in 2022. And that number is only going to go up.
> 📌 Sidebar (Digital Edition Only): Bullshit Production Line > If you want to make a fake viral post in 2024, here’s all you need: > 1. A free AI text generator (like ChatGPT) to write a sensational headline and post text > 2. A free AI image generator (like Midjourney or DALL-E) to make a fake image to go with it > 3. A free social media account > 4. 10 minutes of your time > Total cost: $0. Total time: 10 minutes. Potential reach: millions of people. Potential consequences: zero.
---