The Internet rumor mill is a beast that needs to be fed, and it is always hungry. And sometimes facts get in the way.

But as it turns out, most people may not be so concerned with facts.

“Rumors are a great source of comfort for people,” Barbara Mikkelson, who runs the Web site Snopes with her husband, David, told The Times. For the last 14 years, Snopes has been debunking Internet rumors, urban myths, scams and other assorted folk tales like the one about how Kenya erected a sign welcoming people to the “birthplace of Barack Obama.”

But the wilderness of the Web harbors many rumors.

A recent Times article about eight of the newest gossip kings and queens of cyberspace included an entry about their “most memorable gaffes.” Among the mistakes The Times cited: claiming a football star was the father of a child before a paternity test showed he was not; publishing a rumor that a hedge fund’s brokers were threatening to liquidate during the financial crisis of 2008, when in fact they were not; running an item criticizing the mainstream news media for ignoring a reality show couple, which turned out to be a satirical piece written by a humorist posted on another Web site.

For advice on how not to fall prey to those pesky Internet rumors, it is best to ask an expert. An expert in fake news, that is.

Baratunde Thurston is an editor at The Onion, which specializes in satire, except some people complain they cannot tell the difference between real CNN headlines and The Onion’s parodies.

“Anything that’s too good to be true requires skepticism,” Mr. Thurston told The Times.

A recent Onion video report claimed that a frozen food company had added suicide prevention tips to the packaging of its single-serving microwaveable meals. The report was picked up by several suicide prevention groups, which sent out Twitter feeds about the “news.”

The Internet is a great place to fool people, Mr. Thurston told The Times, because of what he called “tickerization” of news.

Brooks Jackson, the director of the politically oriented Web site FactCheck.org, believes news organizations should be carefully vetting news reports that may not be fake, but contain untruths.

“The ‘news’ that is not fit to print gets through to people anyway these days, through 24-hour cable gasbags, partisan talk radio hosts and chain e-mail, blogs and Web sites,” he wrote to The Times in an e-mail message. “What readers need now, we find, are honest referees who can help ordinary readers sort out fact from fiction.”

That may be so, but Mrs. Mikkelson is not so sure it will have much of an impact.

“It’s not like, ‘Well, we have to get out there and defend the truth,’ ” she told The Times. “When you’re looking at truth versus gossip, truth doesn’t stand a chance.”


TOM BRADY