It’s a strange feeling when you pride yourself on being a champion of truth, a professional information-sharer, and then discover you’ve been peddling a lie for years. That’s the uncomfortable reality I recently confronted. For over a decade, as a speaker and author, I’ve stood before countless audiences, weaving stories, facts, and insights to offer new perspectives. I thought I had a pretty good filter for separating gold from glitter, but as it turns out, even the most vigilant among us can be fooled. The culprit? A seemingly credible historical case study, often cited and widely believed, that I unknowingly helped propagate – the notorious “great horse manure crisis.”
This story, which I used to great effect in my presentations, painted a vivid picture of late 19th-century urban centers like London, suffocating under mountains of horse manure. With over 100,000 horses producing millions of pounds of waste daily, the tale proclaimed, the famed Times of London predicted a grim future where city streets would be buried ten feet deep in excrement within decades. The narrative climaxed with an international urban planning conference in New York in 1898, reportedly abandoned after just three days because no solution could be found. Then, like a knight in shining armor (or rather, a car in internal combustion), the automobile arrived, miraculously solving the problem. It was a compelling anecdote about the unpredictable nature of progress, the rapid pace of technological change, and humanity’s adaptability in the face of disruption. It was, I believed, a perfect illustration. But it was all a meticulously crafted fiction, an urban legend with no roots in reality.
The unraveling was a rude awakening. There was no “horse manure crisis” as depicted, and the Times of London article that supposedly foresaw this impending doom? It never existed, a fact the newspaper itself has clarified. The grand 1898 urban planning conference in New York, where experts supposedly threw up their hands in defeat? A complete fabrication. Historical records indicate the first documented urban planning conference took place in Washington D.C. in 1909, and any mention of an 1898 New York conference only appeared much later, almost exclusively within the context of this very manure crisis myth – a clear tell, in hindsight, that it was a made-up detail to lend credibility to an already fabricated narrative. Discovering this after years of confidently sharing the story was, frankly, horrifying. I had, ironically, become a “misinformation superspreader,” an uncomfortable label for someone who has literally written a book on the dangers of misinformation.
My intention in sharing this embarrassing admission isn’t to dwell on personal failure, but rather to highlight a pervasive and increasingly dangerous societal issue. Firstly, because honesty demands it. It’s crucial to admit mistakes, especially for those of us who deal in information. In a world awash with half-truths and deliberate falsehoods, owning up to our errors is a small but vital step towards fostering integrity. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, because my experience isn’t unique. We all, knowingly or unknowingly, participate in the spread of misinformation. While we broadly agree that honesty is a virtue – research consistently shows it’s one of the qualities we value most in others – the sobering reality is that most of us engage in some form of dishonesty every day. Statistics suggest that over 60% of people lie multiple times an hour. We’ve seen this play out in high-stakes arenas, with political figures consistently making claims that fact-checkers classify as largely untrue. Even prominent businesses, like the London-based Builder.ai, which amassed over $400 million in funding from tech giants like Microsoft, collapsed when their supposed “AI” solution was exposed as a clever facade, powered instead by hundreds of human engineers in India. Closer to home, a consumer investigation found that only a fraction of tested sunscreens met their advertised SPF claims, essentially misinforming consumers about critical health protection. These instances, while perhaps more egregious, are simply magnified examples of a wider problem.
The more insidious aspect of misinformation, however, often isn’t malicious, bald-faced lying. It’s the accidental propagation, the unintentional sharing of incorrect information that we genuinely believe to be true. Take, for instance, the explosion of content surrounding ADHD on platforms like TikTok. Videos on this single topic have garnered over 6 billion views and shares. Given these numbers, it’s highly probable that you or someone you know has encountered or even shared this content. What’s alarming is that less than 50% of these videos have been deemed clinically accurate. This means over 3 billion instances of misinformation, misrepresentation, or misunderstanding are circulating about just one health condition, on one platform. If you’ve shared an ADHD TikTok video, there’s a greater than 50% chance you’ve contributed to this avalanche of incorrect information, perhaps only realizing it now. The advent of powerful generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok has amplified this challenge by making the creation of incredibly convincing, yet often flawed, content almost effortlessly easy. The key distinction here is crucial: “convincing” does not equal “correct.” Deloitte, for example, had to refund over $100,000 to a government client after submitting a report riddled with “AI hallucinations” – confidently presented, but factually baseless, information.
We are indeed entering a new era where our innate human tendency to trust what we read, see, and hear – and more dangerously, our impulse to share it – poses an unprecedented risk to individuals, businesses, and society at large. The path to becoming an accidental “misinformation superspreader” is now shorter and more accessible than ever before. Whether we’re discussing fabricated historical crises on a stage, unverified health claims on TikTok, or any tidbit of information swirling in our interconnected world, our guiding principle must evolve. Our new motto, a critical defense in this landscape of limitless and often unchecked information, should be a simple yet profound one: “Check before you share.” The stakes are too high to do otherwise.