Brave 2.0 World
The main claim […] was superficially true, but substantially false.
In the meantime, of course, there’s a small matter of hundreds of thousands of readers and thousands of active voters voting up the article about [a slanderous claim]. Only if you took the time to read through the hundreds of comments do you get to intrepid readers who [uncovered the true story]. But it was obvious by the rapidly-increasing [upvote] count that nobody was doing research (or even reading to see whether the claim had been refuted), they were simply indicating their condemnation of someone who had transgressed against the […] community. […]
This is a classic Web 2.0 problem: it’s hard to aggregate the wisdom of the crowd without aggregating their madness as well.