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.