Opinion and fact online

From Stayconscious

[edit] Does it matter if we're making it up as we go along?

Language is often a grab-bag of near misses, best shots, and unwitting misunderstandings. It's how we communicate, remember? It's a sort of long-term creative writing project that everyone takes part in, across the centuries - humanity's collective way with words is an attempt to write experience. It's a valiant try at articulating consciousness. It's a lexical game of charades.

Linguistic asides aside; the fact might be that many unfacts on the internet arise from a collective mix of unsupported opinion, imaginings, speculations, desires, misunderstandings and old wives' tales, and a tendency to confuse 'fact' with 'opinion'. IMHO.