“Barack Obama is a Kenyan Muslim man, and he’s married to a man named Michael who transitioned and became Michelle Obama.”

There are actual grown adults in the United States who believe that sentence.

Not people laughing at satire. Not people making a joke. People who actually believe it.

And that has been one of the biggest surprises of my adult life: I seriously underestimated just how gullible, poorly educated and intellectually lazy Americans can be.

And I finally understand why I didn’t see it before.

Like associates with like.

Do you think this stuff was circulating in my circle?

Do you think I was sitting around having conversations with people who sincerely believed Barack Obama was secretly born in Kenya or that Michelle Obama was secretly a man?

How would that conversation even work?

If somebody sitting across from me seriously said that sentence and expected me to accept it as fact, we’d have a much more fundamental problem than politics.

We wouldn’t have a shared standard for determining what is real.

That’s what I missed for years.

Most people I spend significant time around are accomplished at something. They’re colleagues, clients, professionals, business owners, journalists and people who have spent years learning their fields.

So my sample of America was wildly skewed.

When everyone around you reads, works, researches, questions sources and has developed some basic ability to distinguish credible information from nonsense, you naturally assume those skills are normal.

Then social media introduces you to millions of people you’d probably never encounter in your everyday life.

And suddenly you realize:

Oh. Everybody does NOT have that filter.

Some of us can get three sentences into a satire article and recognize satire.

Some people can get 10 paragraphs into it and still be furious about something that never happened.

Some of us see an outrageous headline and instinctively think, Wait. Is that actually true? Others apparently think, I’ve seen this four times now, so it must be true.

That’s the part that fascinates me.

We live in a country where an extraordinary amount of human knowledge is available from a device sitting in your pocket, yet some people will spend three hours watching videos confirming something they already believe and won’t spend three minutes determining whether the original claim is true.

And repetition is incredibly good at exploiting that weakness. One website makes something up. Twenty websites repeat it. Five hundred social-media accounts share it. Someone makes a video. Someone else screenshots the video.

Then somebody says: “Everybody is talking about this.”

No. Everybody isn’t talking about it. You’re watching thousands of repetitions of the same unsupported claim.

That’s one of the most important things the internet has taught me: Repetition is not evidence. Familiarity is not verification. Virality is not credibility. And “people are saying” is not a source.

I knew America had a misinformation problem. What I didn’t understand was how many people had never developed the intellectual defenses necessary to survive one.