There's so much info online, and it's exhausting.

So what does the human brain do? It just goes along with it. There's too much to decipher. Many times you don't even realize you're being fooled.

You just take the misinformation at face value and move on with your life.

A great example of how easily misinformation spreads happened last week.

Long story short, a guy tweeted a ridiculous NFL stat for quarterback Jared Goff:

It blew up. A few days later, Aaron Rodgers quoted the stat on the Pat McAfee Show where they all agreed about how crazy the stat was. Then the original account who tweeted the stat tweeted this out:

As usual, X then labeled the original made-up-stat-tweet with a disclaimer:

And Pat Mcafee set the record straight in his show and admitted they spread false information.

But by that point, how many of us saw that this whole thing was fake? My guess is a handful, but most didn't, and will forever live their lives quoting and spreading a complete bullshit stat.

It's fun to laugh at this in hindsight, until it actually happens to you.

While scrolling LinkedIn during my daily search for professional relevance, I saw this post quoting another post:

After reading it I thought, "yea, we do need to run from this BS! What a colossal waste of time Jaguar spent working on something for so long!" I liked it and moved on.

Unrelated, later, the CTO of our company tweeted out his blog post comparing the Jaguar rebrand to a new Volvo commercial.

I immediately thought of the LinkedIn post criticizing how long the Jaguar campaign took to create. Then I typed out a response to David:

But right before I hit reply, I paused.

Why? Because I remembered that NFL stat thing. Am I sure about this?

So I looked into the LinkedIn post to verify what I could.

I clicked the post that was quoted to see what I could uncover.

What's that there in the comments section?

I sense sarcasm from Britton...so this is a joke? Looks like the other guy believed it, as did I! Fuck me.

Let's go back to the first post from the other guy (Nick) who quoted Britton above. Look down in the comments to investigate some more...aha!

Andy Pearson? Mmmk let's click this guy's name.

Sure enough, Andy posted this exact same copy, quoting a different LinkedIn post that said the same thing.

What the fucking shit is going on here? So is this the original, actual thing I should believe? Looks like it, but then *comments section*

Okay my brain is fully sloshin' around in some bullshit soup with too much salt. Or is that sugar I taste? Wait, no, is that...COCAINE?!

I honestly have no idea what to believe here. Everyone involved in the conversation is in the advertising industry, so maybe this is just one big practical joke to get attention. If so, I've now lost 45 minutes of my life trying to figure out what the hell is even happening.

But if I hadn't, I would have tweeted out some misinformation to David, which he might have taken at face value, then linked and tweeted to his much bigger audience.

And round and round we would have gone 😶‍🌫️

Nobody the wiser, just instant belief in total bullshit.

If the lesson here is "do your own research," to me that really translates to "spend lots of time looking into everything all the time and get nothing done while still falling victim to an endless assembly line of shiny presents with nothing inside them."

Who the hell has time for that?