The internet has changed drastically in the last five years, and most people haven’t noticed how completely the rules of reality itself have been rewritten. Where once a lie took days or weeks to spread, it now takes minutes, sometimes seconds.
A single fabricated headline, a doctored image, or a thirty-second clip lifted out of context can reach tens of millions of people before anyone with authority or basic fact-checking skills even wakes up to the notification.
Two recent examples, circulating within hours of each other last week, illustrate the new normal perfectly.
The first claimed that Max Verstappen, the three-time Formula 1 world champion, had lost his cousin Victor Benoit in the Air India crash that killed over 240 passengers when Flight AI171 went down shortly after takeoff from Ahmedabad.
Within an hour the post had been shared hundreds of thousands of times. Heartfelt condolences poured in from fans, fellow drivers, and even teams. Red Bull Racing’s official account received thousands of messages asking if Max was okay. The only problem: Victor Benoit was not related to Max Verstappen.
He was not anyone’s cousin. The name appears to have been plucked at random from the passenger manifesto and attached to the Dutch driver because the combination sounded believable and tragic.
By the time the Verstappen family and Red Bull issued statements saying they had no connection to any victim, the narrative had already calcified in certain corners of the internet. Some users still insist the denial is part of a “cover-up” to let Max grieve privately.
Less than forty-eight hours later, a very different story exploded across American social media.
A grainy video, apparently recorded on a phone inside what looked like a late-night talk-show studio, showed a tall young man in a dark suit walking across the stage, leaning toward a startled host, and whispering something inaudible.
The chyron at the bottom of the screen read “BARRON TRUMP JUST QUIETLY ENDED THE OBAMA FOUNDATION ON LIVE TV.” The caption claimed the youngest Trump son had delivered a single devastating sentence that legally dissolved the Obama Foundation in front of a live audience, leaving Michelle Obama “speechless” and the studio audience gasping as the temperature “dropped ten degrees.” The clip racked up twenty million views in the first day.
Merchandise appeared within hours: T-shirts that read “He Said It So Cold the AC Broke.” Comment sections filled with people claiming they had “felt the chill through the screen.”
Both stories are completely false, yet both continue to circulate because they feel true to the people who want them to be true. That is the new threshold for believability: not evidence, not logic, not even plausibility in the old sense, but emotional resonance.
If a story scratches an itch (grief for a hero, triumph over a hated enemy), it is accepted as fact long enough to do its work.
By the time the corrections arrive, usually in the form of a small Community Note or a buried fact-check article, the emotional payload has already been delivered. The human brain does not uninstall feelings as easily as it uninstalls misinformation.
This is not simply about “fake news” anymore. The term feels quaint, like calling a nuclear explosion a “loud noise.” What we are witnessing is narrative weaponization at a speed and scale that previous generations could not have imagined.
The tools are now accessible to anyone with a laptop and a grudge. Artificial intelligence can generate realistic video, clone voices, and write convincing captions in seconds. Deepfake technology that once required a Hollywood budget is now available in free browser apps.
The cost of lying has collapsed to almost zero, while the cost of debunking remains stubbornly high.
Traditional gatekeepers (newspapers, broadcast networks, even most government agencies) have been outpaced. A Reuters journalist needs hours or days to verify a claim properly: obtain documents, reach spokespeople, cross-check sources. By then the lie has already mutated into a dozen new forms.
The platforms themselves, under pressure from both regulators and advertisers, try to moderate at scale, but the algorithms that surface content were built to maximize engagement, and outrage is the most engaging emotion of all. A calm, sourced correction rarely breaks one hundred likes.
A screaming falsehood can break a hundred million.
The result is a strange new epistemology: people no longer ask “Is this true?” with the same urgency they ask “Does this feel right?” or “Does this own the people I dislike?” Truth has become a secondary value, subordinate to identity and mood.
When a story confirms that your tribe is winning or the other tribe is suffering, the factual details become negotiable.
This shift has political consequences, obviously, but it also has human ones. Families of real crash victims found their grief hijacked by strangers inventing connections to celebrities.
Staff at the Obama Foundation spent an entire weekend responding to confused donors who genuinely believed the organization had been dissolved by a nineteen-year-old in a single sentence.
Meanwhile, the people who started both hoaxes (one apparently a teenager in Belgium, the other a content farm in Macedonia) made a few thousand dollars each in ad revenue before the posts were finally removed.
We are still in the early chapters of this experiment. The technology will only improve; the lies will only become smoother. Soon it will be impossible to tell, with the naked eye or ear, whether a video of a world leader confessing to a crime is real or synthetic.
Courts, elections, and wars may turn on evidence that never actually existed.
The old answer was better media literacy, slower news consumption, more trust in institutions. Those things help at the margins, but they are no longer enough.
The new answer has to be systemic as well as individual: watermarking standards for AI-generated content, real-time forensic tools baked into platforms, liability for the worst offenders, and perhaps most importantly, a cultural decision that spreading deliberate falsehoods for profit or power is no longer socially acceptable, the way plagiarism or libel became unacceptable in earlier eras.
Until that happens, the Max Verstappen cousin and the ice-cold Barron Trump moment will keep coming, faster and sharper each time. They are not anomalies. They are the new normal, and they are only warming up.
The air in the studio hasn’t actually dropped ten degrees, but the temperature of public discourse certainly has, and it keeps falling.
