It’s easier to get people to believe your sister is a prostitute than to convince them you don’t even have a sister.
A related saying, often incorrectly attributed to Mark Twain (as so many sayings are), and appearing in various forms:
A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
I had a little bit of an epiphany this morning -- because I'm slow, the obvious just hadn't occurred to me before.
The question on my mind was "why do the pseudonymous comment troll or trolls focus so much on making claims about various people that aren't just false, but obviously and risibly false?"
The epiphany: "Because search engines index Disqus comments."
Making the same false claims over and over in different comments on different articles and in different venues populates search engine results with those false claims and boosts their ranks in said results, helping the false claims spread.
So, I will work harder to resist the temptation to approve, and respond to, comments containing claims that aren't just false, but obviously and risibly false.
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