Robert and Maureen McQuillan write:

Viral…
General meaning: Piece of information circulated rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another.

In other words, something nasty wrongly picked up, misunderstood, quickly accepted and passed on.

These is one of the hazards of unpoliced internet…people ‘find’ a lot of material but neither check the source nor its authenticity and unthinkingly forward it on to many other web surfers. And so, ‘stuff’ – especially untruths – is readily accepted and regarded as ‘gospel truth.’

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