Most stuff you see on the web is not original reporting or research. Instead, it is often commentary on the re-reporting of re-reporting on some original story or piece of research. And that's a problem.

Now, in some cases stories or findings get better as they pass through intermediaries. If I tell a reporter a piece of gossip I heard, and they go out and verify it by talking to eyewitnesses and experts, their report on my piece of gossip is probably more accurate than my gossip. If a scientist gets a result and another scientist with a talent for explaining things blogs it, maybe the second explanation is better than the first. Research also shows that as gossip gets passed around, sometimes important details that were missed become more prominent.

But in most cases, the more a story is passed around, the more it starts to become a bit warped. That's due to a bunch of reasons. Human nature is to exaggerate stories for effect. Desire of websites to get advertising dollars can result in them printing the most shocking version of something. And there are bad actors: people who will take a story that has some nuance to it and remove the details that provide that nuance, or invent details that didn't exist.

Very often by the time a story finds you on the web it has been altered so much that it presents a radically wrong version of an event or a piece of research. The person you are reading usually did no original reporting, made no phone calls to check facts, and often barely skimmed the original story before writing up their blog post, thinkpiece, hot take, or re-reported news item. And so they either get things wrong by mistake, or, in some cases, intentionally mislead.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem. Usually, the original reporting, research, or photo is available on the web. By going to the original reporting or research source (or finding a high quality secondary source that did the hard work of verification) you can get a story that is more complete, or a research finding that is more accurate.