The Internet is not one big fat lie, it's millions of little skinny ones

This is what Bill Gates calls a BGO -- a blinding glimpse of the obvious: Don't believe what you read on the Internet. Even President Obama blames fake online news stories for the tide of disinformation that pushed the election to its unlikely conclusion.

So how does that work, exactly? How is it that millions of us, mostly intelligent, wary, discriminating citizens, get sucked in by so much creative writing posing as real news?

Think about what causes something to go viral -- every marketer's dream.

The worst way to get anything to go viral is to try. One thing we seem to be very good at is spotting people or companies trying to play us, and we don't like that. We express our dislike by not sharing the video, or whatever it was we got. And inertia kills going viral. 

On the other hand we reward not trying -- think "Charlie bit my finger" -- by sharing the hell out of it. Which is how it goes viral.

On the Internet great success comes from not trying. 

Put up a big fat lie on the Internet and...not much happens. Concoct a story about how the city of Chicago sank into Lake Michigan, profusely illustrated, and you won't even get a yawn. It'll just sit there, lonely like a lox, attracting no attention. 

The magic is in little stories, little lies, little exaggerations -- lots and lots of them. Thousands. Millions. Take the truth and twist it just a little bit -- make it plausible enough that it's not shocking, just playing into whatever narrative you're serving, not arousing suspicion by slinking around on little cat feet. Do that over and over and over again and you create an atmosphere of agreement around that point of view you're pushing. Then people will share it innocently, and in droves.

Think of all those little skinny lies -- Obama doesn't wear a flag lapel pin, Obama didn't place flowers on the Tomb of the Unknowns, Hillary has some disease or other -- they get passed and read and believed and passed around some more. That's viral. 

And hardly anyone checks, even though snopes.com does a great job of sussing out the true from the false. 

Suddenly Facebook has awoken to the fact -- "I'm shocked. Shocked!" -- their platform is being used as a launching pad for a myriad of poop-filled micro-missiles of misinformation. 

Someone (Seth Godin?) said we trust the news media some of the time, we trust our friends most of the time and we trust ourselves all of the time. 

Checking every Internet story for accuracy would be impractical, cumbersome and stifling -- but doing just a little checking on our own before hitting "send" to our list of friends seems like a pretty basic responsibility.

We see how things turn out if we don't check.

One year a piñata

Sometime last year during the Republican primaries I became part of a loose email group consisting of a bunch of guys way off to my political right. Maybe it started when someone shared a meme making fun of President Obama bowing to the Emperor of Japan, or perhaps someone circulated an outraged email accusing the President of not laying a wreath on Memorial Day. The provocation doesn't matter, I did what I always do: I went to snopes.com to find out the real story and then I sent it to everyone who had gotten the original email.
Some of the people I knew -- mostly old school friends -- and some I didn't.
Over a few weeks this loose bunch of emailers' behavior gelled into a predictable choreography: Provocation from one of them, research and response by me.
So I became the designated piñata, which is how things remained until today, the day before Election Day. Putting it in David Letterman's terms, these are the
Top 10 Things I Learned Being a Piñata

1. We live in political echo chambers. Had I not joined this group, the rest of them would have endlessly circulated their (often inaccurate or completely fabricated) emails, expressing outrage at how horrible the [President][Minority Leader][Democrats in general] are. The idea of fact-checking would have never entered into the conversation.
2. Fox News has wormed its way into viewers' brains. I noticed their arguments were often very similar to one another, to the point of sharing exact phrases. I'm not a frequent Fox News viewer but on occasions when I've watched I was struck by hearing the very same phrases. Fox News has become a very effective meme propagator.
3. It's nearly impossible to change someone's mind. Over the past year I found hundreds of errors, exaggerations and flat-out confabulations I was able to show my rightie friends. This had zero impact. None. They remain resolutely and happily entrenched in their beliefs. Oh, and they blame Snopes.
4. It's easy to fall into the "He's an idiot" trap. Armed with overwhelming evidence supporting the correctness of my arguments, it has been difficult to see why I didn't pull off at least one conversion. But I didn't. So my conclusion was, over and over again, sterling educational pedigrees aside, they're too dumb to get it. What else could it be?
5. One issue overwhelms all other issues. Each of the guys on the email list had their own hot button: Israel. Muslims. Immigration, The debt. Whatever that issue was, it overshadowed everything else. And it also managed to color everything else to the point where no productive conversation could take place.
6. How school buddies have diverged politically over time. I have no memory of what my friends' politics were when we were together in school. My best guess is that in the majority of cases politics at that time really didn't matter--other than avoiding getting drafted into overseas peril. Today, decades later, how far apart we are.
7. No harm being the minority. Being continually on the defensive sharpened my thinking, improved my arguments and I learned things I probably wouldn't have otherwise.
8. Agreement overlooks many faults. People with whom I have seldom agreed (i.e., Glenn Beck, George W. Bush) suddenly became attractive when I found out we had a common enemy. 
9. Accuracy vanishes when forwarding a friendly point of view.The number of jaw-droppingly astounding claims I've received from my email buddies is amazing. They are just so delighted to hear Barack Obama has a Muslim love child, or Nancy Pelosi is a multiple ax murderer, or Bill Clinton's foundation funds ISIS, that they will pass it along without so much as the smallest effort to check its accuracy. 
10. This was fun. In an election season almost completely fun-deprived, being a piñata added a lot of enjoyment. I recommend it.