5000 upvotes, hundreds of comments, easy to verify, 100% wrong

I think framing this as a technology problem, as quite a few folks tend to do, is the wrong approach. There are plenty of nuggets of memetic knowledge that are simply false, but still passed around by word of mouth (or, in some extreme cases, by more systemic methods).

I hope a non-controversial example of this is the idea that vaccines cause autism: patently false, spread through a million different mediums, easy to disprove (if you look in the right places, as recommended in the article), yet still a pervasive thought.

> This is a serious problem that we need to face online - a culture of fact checking needs to be pushed, even for small things like this.

It needs to happen everywhere, and it's not going to be a technological answer.