Tyrannosaurus Wreck

If you search TikTok for any combination of #dinosaur, #conspiracy, or #dinotok, you will find a mass of results, which range from speculations about the appearance of the long-extinct beasts to anti-scientific assertions that they never existed at all.

A recent video stands out: a woman chatting furtively to her phone camera about machine-translating a news story from China in her nail salon. According to her, the Chinese government has found "uncharted land" with "thousands" of dinosaur-like creatures "up to 13 feet tall."

The idea of uncharted land swarming with prehistoric reptiles is not even the strangest conspiracy circulating on social media.

On platforms from TikTok to YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, conspiracists share their convictions that the government is controlling us through fluoride in the water supply, the earth is hollow and birds are not real.

Fake news is a huge part of our information ecosystem. Recent statistics suggest that a decline in media literacy combined with a rise in the number of people accessing news primarily through social media is exacerbating the trend.¹

Some are even calling this a "post-truth" age - an era where objective facts play next to no role in shaping public opinion.

Some experts think conspiracy is just part of human nature. Fake news and conspiracies have been around since the dawn of civilisation itself.

They say that conspiracies are a means of simplifying the world into easy categories - villain, victim, hero - and that they become more prevalent in times of economic or social instability. "They help to restore a sense of agency and control," one social psychologist asserts.

Others point out that social media has turned a fringe movement into a way of life, pointing out that levels of belief in fake news appear to have spiked in conjunction with the popularisation of online content-sharing platforms. It might be a human problem, but there is a technological solution.

For some, we need to find our way back to a rational way of life. The 17th Century Enlightenment movement touted the importance of public reason, and encouraged people to engage in informed debate - to not commit to a belief until you could justify it completely. We could learn a lot from this in the modern age.

Yes: We have identified what makes fake news so successful: social media. We need to ban all social media that has any political affiliation, and we need to be tougher on regulating the information that is allowed to circulate online.

No: Conspiracy is an inherent part of human nature. We have had conspiracy theories since the dawn of time, and they can serve a purpose: some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true.

Or... We might have a penchant for believing in things that are not entirely true, but it is not an incurable condition. The best we can do is educate people, especially young people, on how to identify accurate news online.