alt Hacker NewsYeah, the insane takes spread faster but it takes more time and resources to look into it than just come to conclusions early.
The worst thing is this creates an environment where most people are either completely credulous and buy into everything or completely incredulous and think everything is unfounded. It's just exhausting to have a healthy level of skepticism these days, and maybe 1 out of 1000 times (number source: from thin air) something that sounds insane actually has some truth to it.
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The problem is that good journalism doesn't have funding. Otherwise this shit would never have made it into a newspaper, maybe outside of a really shitty yellow rag.
Yeah, for a substantial fraction of people, this case will stick to their minds as "oh the chinese .. again" It's both sad and scary. It was even submitted to HN. Flagged by now, but still. Many people won't have read this follow-up, especially since it doesn't come as a 1-sentence TL;DR..
Sadly, this is just another example of "A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth puts on its shoes."
That doesn't mean that every sensational thing is a lie, but verifying the truth definitely takes time!