Of course, it's not so simple. There is a gray area where concepts like free speech lurk in the shadows, and I believe leading tech companies reflect a widely shared caution for making the distinction between opinions and lies; Twitter was lauded recently for flagging certain posts with tentative labels, which I read along the lines of "this Tweet, potentially, has some information which is disputed, by some, for possibly being a bit misleading, we think, maybe" (2). But my mockery aside, it might be our best option in the present - with the notable exception of futuristic sites like Wikipedia, which maintains a front of being an encyclopedia by actively culling outdated information, the internet remains more like a photo album than a Christmas card (3).
There are serious ways to further explore this situation but I'd rather consider the way I came to this idea, which was through a much more mundane example - I learned recently that coffee, which I always understood to be a diuretic, was in fact about as hydrating as water. I believed differently for a long time, perhaps close to three decades, but a few unofficial experiments proved the hypothesis - I replaced coffee with water yet saw no change to my morning routine (4). I confirmed my result like any good millennial - I went to Google - where I saw that although the diuretic effect exists, its impact is mild at best and not at all relevant in terms of hydration levels. But I also found plenty of articles making different arguments which led me to a realization - there's (probably) no one out there actively lying about this, but there are plenty of folks who are still mistaken, and many more who had their say years ago when this belief was possibly more commonly accepted; it's not hard to find lies on the internet, but it might be impossible to find a liar.
Footnotes
1) It was from an Animorphs book - #16. This is where I'm supposed to say something like "don't ask me how I remember that" but the truth is that, like anything else, I remember it because it was memorable.
2) I'm tempted to test the algorithm with something like - "Fact: the sky is green" - just to see if Twitter would flag it with something more strongly worded, like - "THIS IS A FUCKING LIE".
3) In the good old days, tomorrow's newspaper could always reset the world by exercising veto power over yesterday's paper. These days, I can write a post declaring "IT'S SATURDAY" and it will remain online for a while, and presumably forever, which gives my eternal audience, depending on the day they read it, a six in seven chance of concluding I'm a liar.
4) In hindsight, it didn't help that I set myself up to be fooled - I always drink coffee early in the day, which made it seem like it was forcing bathroom trips, but as noted above drinking water instead of coffee didn't change my habits. The embarrassing aspect of this revelation is that I should know better - timing is the most common confounding variable but I never applied my academic understanding to the real world.
