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A while back someone told me an electric car was not a car, because it doesn't have a carburetor. So you have to call it an EV. I took him at his word. Then I was on a train and I said something to another passenger about the train car we were in. And I thought;
Maybe the word "car" isn't short for "carburetor", maybe it's short for "carriage"? So I checked. Yup;
https://www.etymonline.com/word/car#5353
Was that EV geek messing with me, or did it never occur to him?
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I confidently passed this non-fact on to a bunch of other people before I thought to fact-check it. At least some of them probably assumed I knew what I was talking about, and passed it on to others.
This is how viral misinformation spreads. Along relationships of trust and credibility, that tunnel under critical thinking. People spreading disinformation hack those channels to spread their intentionally-generated non-facts.
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