"This stuff" has been around for ages. Forty years ago in my teens, I read a book with a very memorable anecdote about locals insisting canabalism was "a local custom" and defending their right to practice it. The British official in charge replied "It's our custom to shoot cannibals."

When I was homeless, I asked around on the internet for a source for who said that. There is a real incident where a British official said something like "We shoot people who do that" but it wasn't about cannibalism.

But the toxic classist forum where I asked initially replied to me with basically "You're just a stupid homeless person misremembering that." No, I read it in my teens when I had a near photographic memory and was one of the top students in my high school class and everyone respected me as one of the smart people, long before the world decided I was some loser making things up. I'm quite clear the anecdote in the book was about cannibalism.

There is a real historical incident similar to it, but the book got the details wrong.

I have also read some crazy accounts of how Einstein's Theory was proved because the solar eclipse bent light so much, you could see a star that our Sun should have been obscuring.

Humans tend to believe things we read. If it's in writing, it has some kind of authority in our minds.

This is often not the case and we need to get better about recognizing that a lot of "writing" on the internet is just modern chit chat and not reliable.