In 2009, a writer took information from a government report and wrote about it, calling it “this grim statistic.” Her article was referenced time and again on website after website.

Some places began citing, not that first article, but articles that had been written about it, getting further and further away from the original source. And no one (other than me) bothered to look at the original government report that the first article was based on. So no one noticed that the first article was flawed. The writer had either misunderstood the statistic or purposely slanted it, igniting a chain of reports, each as gleefully flawed as the first.

In 2015, I came across this statement on a website: “Millennials are more forgetful than seniors.” Being a somewhat forgetful senior, I was intrigued.

After a little rooting around, I discovered the site was referencing a 2013 article in the Huffington Post, entitled “Study Shows Millennials Are More Forgetful Than Seniors.”

Study? I love studies. Studies are primary sources. I wanted to locate the study and read it for myself. However, it turned out there was no study. Just a tiny survey, performed by a site called the Trending Machine. How tiny? The survey had been taken by 800 people aged 18 and older and was administered online from July 2 to 4 of 2013.

An online survey of 800 people hardly represents the mental abilities of 300 million Americans. But the claim that people 18 to 34 have worse memories than people 55 and older spread across the internet. Even major websites touted it as true, referencing either the Huffington Post article or reports about that article, such as coverage it received on Dr. Oz’s blog. Reports about reports. And apparently no one (other than me) bothered to look at the source.

Bad research and shoddy reporting is one thing. Here’s an example of something called circular reporting.

In 2012, Alan MacMasters, a British student in his first year of university, heard a professor caution against using Wikipedia as a primary source, because you never know who might have set themselves up as the inventor of the toaster. This gave Alan an idea for a prank. Alan’s friend, Alex, edited the Wikipedia article on the invention of the toaster, replacing the name of the inventor, Charles Strite, with Alan MacMasters.

A year later, the fake name had not been challenged, so Alex took the hoax further. He made up a ton of details about the fictional MacMasters, writing that he was born in 1865 and invented the toaster in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1893. Alex took a picture of himself, doctored it in Photoshop to make it look like a 19th century photograph, and placed it on the Wikipedia site, claiming it was MacMasters.

Newspapers, encyclopedias, government agencies, museums, and libraries honored Alan MacMasters as the inventor of the toaster, using the Wikipedia article as their primary source. Wikipedia, in turn, used those honors as references in its toaster article, supporting the article’s supposed authenticity.

The hoax wasn’t uncovered until 2022.