Facebook is one of the greatest frauds whereby thoughtless friends share or tacitly embrace ideas which, in doing so, adds personal, relatable flair to messages being distributed from largely unknown reporters.
In effect, these friends then subject a wider community to the thought that since their friends are supportive of such ideas, then they ought to carry some merit or authenticity.
Of course, most Facebook friends haven’t conducted even a shred of due diligence to ascertain the validity of either the story or the reporter, so the message travels more than halfway around the world, or dozens of times across it, before the truth comes out.
Meanwhile, the average Facebook user begins to (either actively or passively) endorse the original message as truth, rushing to judgment and prescriptions as he or she becomes immune to that eventual emergence of actual truth.
By this time, it is far too late, as Facebook busybodies have already launched GoFundMe pages and other campaigns to remedy the problem as it had originally been reported, while any conflicting news is relegated to the rank of fringe theory, at best, or that of nonsense, which is far more common.
Ironically, the average reader elevates himself beyond those later stories only on the knowledge first acquired, rendering himself immune to subsequent reports as a means to protect himself from being wrong.
All the while, he is merely seduced by the persuasive powers of prima facie evidence over objective reality, the latter of which is left to fight an arduous uphill battle against an army fueled by fancifully-contrived fairy tales which fit the ongoing narrative being produced by still others who know what’s going on, while the unwitting public is all too happy to oblige.