Each day we're bombarded by a flood of lies, misinformation and half-truths.

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More than half of adults get news from social media, yet less than a third of content creators factcheck their content and more than 80 per cent of influencers raised Australian Competition and Consumer Commission flags for misleading advertising.

Artificial intelligence puts the problem on steroids, making production of large volumes of highly convincing fakes easier and cheaper than ever.

We've entered a world where even when you train people, you find it hard to tell the different between real and made up.

Most of us hate living in a world like this, and we don't like to think of ourselves as people who would deliberately spread fabricated nonsense.

But what if we're unknowingly complicit? Could you inadvertently be a misinformation superspreader? It's more likely than you think.

As a professional author and speaker, you'd think I'd have a decent nose for detecting BS. Most days, you'd be right. But I recently found out that a case study I've been sharing for years was not just inaccurate - it was fabricated. Whoops.

Have you heard of the Great Horse Manure Crisis? You might have - it's oft-told. It goes like this: in the late 1800s, the 100,000-plus horses of London produced millions of pounds of manure a day. It was piling up in the streets. The Times of London predicted that within decades every street would be buried under 10 feet of manure.

The first international urban planning conference was convened in New York 1898 to discuss the issue but was abandoned when no solution could be found. The crisis was unsolvable. Then the motor car comes along and the problem solves itself. I mean, not if you're a horse. If you're a horse, the motor car is just the beginning of your problems.

It's an anecdote about the folly of predicting the future, the........

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