Rumor Mills

RUMOR MILLS
    Once the nation’s rumor mills came very close to violating EPA guidelines.
    For years, the standard one-part-per-million limit on rank improbabilities and eye-watering lies had sufficed to ensure the relative safety of the general populace, since prevailing winds could be counted on to disperse routinely foul emissions as well as the occasional release of potentially far more serious ones.
    When levels of toxicity previously assumed to be tolerable threatened to exceed these limits, however—most notably with the relaxing of guidelines on the degree of deviation from fact allowed the worst offenders, when the rumor mills were kept churning away 24/7 and the general populace was urged to cover their eyes, hold their noses, and trust their elected leaders to determine just how much fouling of the air was permissible—calls for stricter controls and stiffer penalties could lead to unpleasant consequences indeed for those bold enough even to open their mouths in such noxious conditions. They could expect sustained and poisonous blow-back from well-known sources of deceit released in the dark of night.
    Yet once the initial alarms about something poisonous in the wind had worn off, what purpose would it serve, many public officials and rumor-mill operators asked, to insist that the first priority must be emergency cleaning of the air? On the contrary, they said with every confidence, revising upwards the guidelines for tolerable levels of falsehood going forward should be prioritized and exhaustive consideration by blue-ribbon commissions set up by the powers that be should go on for years.
    In the meantime, the advice given the public at large about poison levels in the air was “get used to it.” And here’s where social media giants demonstrated the level of their civic awareness by offering a way of adjusting to new conditions that involved citizens’ taking in and holding for as long as possible the thickening mix of hype, hearsay, and hot air generated day and night across their Internet platforms in the form of troll updates, character assassination, reality-denial, pseudo-science-on-demand, sniff-test-failing conspiracy theories by the metric ton while the social media giants themselves tried to decide what more they could do when it came to the polluting of trust and truth on a national scale. 
    On a parallel front, increasing tolerance for this public bane in stages by gradually numbing people’s gag reflex until virtually nothing brought an immediate and severe reaction anymore was strongly touted as a miracle remedy with the soothing advice of “Try it. What have you got to lose?”