The Internet is a wonderful tool but it also has a lot to answer for. Conspiracy theories for one thing. And rumours, for another.
You can disseminate pretty much anything you like on the World Wide Web and before you know it half the world believes it's true; well the gullible half anyway.
I suppose that's why to this day people are still being taken in by those email scams that go something like this:
"Good morning to you, beloved. And I hope you are blessed with the day. My name is Princess Saleema Christian. I was borned in Nigeria, the daughter of a very very rich man. Unfortunately he had now passed to heaven but before he go he leave US$55 million in the United Bank of Lagos. Because of regulation I cannot withdraw such presents. Please to give me your account details, including password and security numbers so I can put all the money to you. Yours truly in God, Saleema Christian."
Now you wouldn't think too many people would take such blandishments as gospel, but apparently there's no accounting for wishful thinking.
Equally, people believe any number of other far-fetched tales that circulate on the web.
Take the wild story doing the rounds just a few days ago that Tom Cruise had fallen off Kauri Cliffs while filming up in Northland.
Baloney is the kindest thing you can say about that, and is pretty much what his publicist did say.
Tom is alive and well and spotted a few days ago in New York where his wife, Katie Holmes, is appearing in the Arthur Miller play All My Sons. (Now that's not a hoax.)
The item was traced back to a website called fakeawish.com.
The denial was published far and wide, an indication of just how much currency the rumour attained in a short few days.
The Internet is heaven for political mischief-makers, and in this election season there is no shortage of takers.
An email letter arrived the other day claiming that Barack Obama had terrorist affiliations, was a Muslim and wasn't even a naturalised United States citizen - and why weren't we writing about this? It's all there on the Internet, the writer said, as if that sealed it.
Yes, it is all there on the Internet, along with zillions of other fables.
You can read all about it: the background to the hoax that Barack Obama is a Muslim; you can veer into the absurd with the story about Barack Obama being the Antichrist as prophesied in the New Testament; or the falsehood that the democratic presidential candidate is not a natural-born US citizen and therefore is ineligible to be president.
And of course there's the one, if you look hard enough, about Senator Obama's "terrorist" connections.
None of it is true, of course, although the best hucksters and charlatans base their hoaxes on just enough fact to make the story plausible, then they twist and turn and falsify and weave their web of deceit.
At present the rumour mill, hot-wired to the web, is working overtime, much of it at the behest of Barack Obama's adversaries, determined to sully his name or discredit him.
But as we have seen in the last day or so, this can backfire.
On Sunday, prominent Republican and former secretary of state General Colin Powell, endorsed Mr Obama for president of the United States.
In part, he was perturbed by the way in which senior members of his party were putting it about that the Democrat was a Muslim, or had "terrorist feelings", or somehow else was unpatriotic and unworthy of high office.
The problem for these people is that Senator Obama has been in the public eye now almost continuously for about 18 months through the searching Primary battle for the democratic nomination with Hillary Clinton.
Gruelling though it was, most of the falsehoods that might have swayed the ingénues, the naifs and the wilfully suggestible have lost their natural ardour - and been shown up for what they are.
Smear politics.
Some damage could still be done but at last, an honourable man - General Powell - doing an honourable thing and castigating his own side for taking US politics, and by extension its people, into the gutter.
He might also have taken a few people to task over the depradations of the net.
It is about time folks wised up to its shortcomings.
A wonderful tool, of course, but also a haven for con artists, criminals, liars and the plainly stupid.
Simon Cunliffe is assistant editor at the Otago Daily Times.
