Jonathan Swift wrote centuries ago that "falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it”. Mark Twain echoed the same truth in his own way: "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." Both men wrote long before electricity existed, before the telephone, before the internet. And yet between them they have produced the most accurate description of our world today.
ECONOMY OF FAKE NEWS
Jonathan Swift wrote centuries ago that "falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it”. Mark Twain echoed the same truth in his own way: "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes." Both men wrote long before electricity existed, before the telephone, before the internet. And yet between them they have produced the most accurate description of our world today.
Think about the last time you opened YouTube or Instagram. Within minutes, you were probably watching someone in a confident voice tell you something sensational or alarming. A doctor explaining why your medication is secretly poisoning you. A self-declared analyst revealing the ‘real story’ behind a political crisis that the mainstream media is ‘hiding’. Perhaps a breathless commentator explaining how a neighbouring country is plotting your nation's destruction. The production quality looks professional. The tone sounds authoritative. And the story feels, somehow, just believable enough.
Most of it is rubbish. But it earns very good money.
This is the part of the misinformation crisis that rarely gets discussed openly. We talk about fake news as if it is mostly driven by ideology or political manipulation. Sometimes it is. But a great deal of it is driven by something far more mundane: the subscriber count and the advertising revenue that follows it. A YouTube channel that posts carefully verified analysis will struggle to reach ten thousand subscribers. One that posts outrage, conspiracy, and manufactured crisis will reach a million. Social media platform rewards sensation. So sensation is what is produced in enormous quantities every single day.
Most of the YouTube /Instagram or other social media journalists have understood this perfectly. They have built entire business empires on the model of maximum alarm at minimum cost. A story does not need to be true. It needs to be shareable. It needs to make the viewer feel that they know something others do not, that the establishment is lying, that danger is around the corner. Pakistan, the Gulf states and dozens of other countries now have thriving cottage industries of digital commentators who specialise in damaging their own country's reputation, or a neighbour's, because controversy generates clicks and clicks generate income. The national interest is nobody's concern when there is a monetisation target to hit.
What is more troubling is that this model has now spread far beyond politics into domains where the consequences are genuinely dangerous. Medical doctors, or people presenting themselves as medical doctors, have discovered that Instagram and YouTube offer something that years of careful clinical practice cannot: a massive audience and a monthly income that most hospitals cannot match. So they migrate from the consultation room to the camera. And once in front of the camera, the temptation is overwhelming. Evidence-based medicine is complicated and boring to a general audience. Confident, dramatic, non-scientific advice is simple, shareable and enormously popular.
The result is that millions of people in our region are now receiving health guidance from social media influencers rather than qualified practitioners. People are abandoning prescribed medications based on a YouTube video. Mothers are making decisions about their children's nutrition based on an Instagram reel. Patients with serious conditions are turning to unverified remedies promoted by individuals whose primary qualification is a large follower count. This is not a small problem at the margins. We are facing a real health crisis here, one hiding behind entertaining videos and confident smiles, and it keeps growing because clicks pay better than conscience.
In the end, the truth still travels. It is just slower than lies and it needs far more help than it currently receives. Every time someone pauses before sharing a shocking story, every time a journalist refuses to publish something unverified, every time a doctor chooses the consultation room over the camera, that help arrives
The broader damage goes beyond individual harm. Sustained misinformation makes it difficult to have a shared sense of reality that makes collective life possible. When people cannot agree on basic facts, when every institution is permanently suspect, when every crisis is framed as evidence of a hidden conspiracy, governance becomes nearly impossible. A democratic debate requires some common ground of agreed-upon truth. Take that away and what remains is noise, resentment, and the kind of politics that feeds on both.
Gary Kasparov (Chess Grandmaster) stated it plainly in our own time: "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth”. The goal is not always to make you believe a particular lie. Sometimes it is simply to make you so exhausted and confused that you stop believing anything at all. A population that trusts nothing can be led anywhere.
The first responsibility belongs to each of us, as individuals. The habit of pausing before sharing is more powerful than it sounds. When a story makes you immediately angry, afraid, or triumphant, that emotion is worth examining. Misinformation is engineered to produce exactly those feelings, because emotional people share without thinking.
Asking two or three simple questions before passing something on - who made this and what do they gain from it, does this source have any real accountability, what is conveniently not being mentioned -- will not make anyone a professional fact-checker. But it will interrupt the reflex that turns ordinary citizens into unpaid distributors of other people's lies.
Professors and researchers sit on genuine expertise that is desperately needed in public conversation. But that expertise stays locked inside journals written in a language ordinary people cannot follow, presented at conferences ordinary people never attend. When economists do not push back on false economic claims circulating on WhatsApp, when public health researchers do not publicly challenge the medical misinformation spreading in their own communities, the space is filled by people with cameras, charisma and no particular commitment to accuracy.
Parliamentarians carry the heaviest responsibility of all. They are lawmakers, but they are also the most visible communicators in any society. Every unverified claim made for political gain, every rumour amplified because it is useful in the moment, sets a standard that the rest of society notices. And when legislators act irresponsibly with information, they send a quiet message that responsibility does not matter. Cross-border cooperation is also urgently needed because misinformation does not respect national boundaries. A false story manufactured in one country can destabilise another within hours.
Some countries have begun to act. Singapore requires corrections on demonstrably false claims. Taiwan teaches media and digital literacy as a core school subject. These are imperfect but real steps, and they prove that action is possible without becoming censorship.
In the end, the truth still travels. It is just slower than lies and it needs far more help than it currently receives. Every time someone pauses before sharing a shocking story, every time a journalist refuses to publish something unverified, every time a doctor chooses the consultation room over the camera, that help arrives. It is quiet, unglamorous work. But in a world where falsehood flies, slowing it down even a little is one of the most important things any of us can do.
The writer is a professor at the School of Economics, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.
