If you're the sort of person who gets news from social media, it's very possible you saw a viral story today about Trump dumping a bunch of fish food into a koi pond. The president met with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe, and they took a moment to feed a bunch of carp together.

This is straightforward, painfully banal stuff that wouldn't warrant a headline in better days.

But this is 2017, and the "story," if you'd call it that, was quickly taken out of context and even misrepresented in a rush for viral traffic. Several outlets reported that Trump unloaded his entire box of food as Abe delicately dropped spoonfuls. This painted the president as an oaf lacking the necessary patience for polite ceremony.

Trump usually doesn't need help coming off like an ogre, but in this case, the reports were misleading. Abe had in fact dumped his fish food first, as many outlets have now reported.

As innocuous as the news seems, it's actually a perfect example of how simple events — wrung through the internet content machine — can be perverted, politicized, and amplified to disastrous effect. This is a phenomenon that has only intensified under Trump.

While the phenomenon of bogus viral stories isn't a new one, the prism through which we experience it very much is. Just last week, we learned how Russian trolls leveraged viral stories to shape our political discussions on social media around election season. The stakes suddenly seem quite a bit higher than ever before: Even a news consumer who ignores political stories could unwittingly play into a political agenda simply by sharing viral junk online, extending the influence of a bad actor who concocted the "news" to begin with.

Of course, the koi are political.

How it happened

Reports surfaced early in the morning that Trump had committed a fishy faux pas during his visit to Japan. As is often the case with these stories, journalists on Twitter first seized on the moment. An editor at CBS tweeted photos from the incident, as did Yashar Ali and many others.

Four stages of Trump’s latest diplomatic incident: Tokyo koi pond edition. pic.twitter.com/Bx3FsEoXyq — Zack Whittaker (@zackwhittaker) November 6, 2017

I've deleted this tweet which was based on multiple news reports but the video clearly shows Abe dumping his box of food first. pic.twitter.com/nsdt8U0awj — Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) November 6, 2017

ABC News appeared to have one of the first videos — an oddly cropped square presentation that showed Trump, but not Abe, dumping the food.

Pres. Trump helped Prime Minister Abe feed the fish outside the Akasaka Palace in Tokyo. https://t.co/8FiQzBf4qm pic.twitter.com/M9OVyIFuQg — ABC News (@ABC) November 6, 2017

But perhaps most instructive of all: The Guardian, a UK paper with nearly 200 years of history, published an incorrect account shortly after 1 a.m. EST, the Internet Archive shows.

"Trump dump: president throws entire box of fish food into precious koi carp pond," the headline read. A subhead continued: "While his host, Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe, spoons small amounts of feed, the US leader gives the fish a large feast."

The story focused on Trump's "misstep," with an eye-popping intro:

It was perhaps only a matter of time before Donald Trump’s brasher instincts smashed through the ring of decorum that had held fast on his gaffe-free first day in Japan.

The victims: the colourful, and much loved, koi carp of Akasaka palace in Tokyo.

Naturally, the story was shared on social media, and it performed very well. Data from CrowdTangle, a service that tracks social sharing, shows that more than 41 million "followers" were potentially exposed to the story. (Because this number is derived from the number of users who follow the social accounts that shared the news, the actual number of human beings who saw it is likely smaller.)

Once things became a bit more clear, The Guardian thoroughly updated its post, which raises an entirely different set of issues. The new version has a fresh headline — "Fishy business: Trump and Abe dump fish food into precious koi pond" — and the text that follows has been totally transformed. Take the new subhead, for instance: "US president and Japanese host give fish a large feast on second day of former's five-nation tour of Asia."

And the first lines no longer have anything to do with Trump's "brasher instincts":

Donald Trump and the Japanese prime minister, Shinzo Abe, have taken a forceful approach to feeding fish on the second day of the US president’s five-nation tour of Asia.

Standing beside a pond brimming with colourful koi in the Akasaka palace in Tokyo, the two men began spooning out fish food before appearing to lose patience and emptying their wooden containers with a shake.

You can practically hear the square peg squeaking through the round hole. The revised article is a retrofit that likely wouldn't have been written if a correction hadn't required it, because it isn't news. The Guardian put a short correction at the bottom ("This article was amended on 6 November 2017 to make clear that Shinzo Abe also emptied the contents of his container into the pond"), but it doesn't explain to readers how it scrubbed wrong information from its pages. The paper did not immediately respond to Mashable's request for more information.

Notably, the outlet has not deleted social media posts showing the original headline, which could allow the falsehood to spread if people share without clicking into the story, though the correspondent behind the piece tweeted a "mea culpa."

A bigger pond

To be crystal clear, The Guardian is not the only outlet that bungled this story. And there's a long line of publications that have run with iffy reports for the sake of traffic over the years. (Last year, I stepped into this trap, or very close to it, at Mashable.)

But if there's ever a time to reexamine the systems and incentives that pressure outlets and writers to produce these stories without proper vetting or skepticism, it's now. To state the obvious, there's an increasing divide between Republicans and Democrats, according to recent surveys from the Pew Research Center; false reports that seem designed to rip Trump a new one likely aren't helping.

Less obvious, but no less pressing, is the creeping discord we've faced as a result of viral news stories that are designed to make people lose faith in institutions — including the free press. This is a larger issue than Trump's presidency. It's about democratic values that should be defended at all costs.

Consider historian Timothy Snyder's words in his recent book On Tyranny:

It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.

The "koi" are harmless, except taken en masse, when they make everything seem like it could be a lie. It is comforting that the largest outlets immediately recognized their mistakes here and corrected, but these are damaging errors that should not be ignored.

Though there are many bad actors — included among them platforms like Facebook and Twitter that reward "engagement" and the spread of any information with emotion-tickling "likes" and "retweets" — individuals, and especially professionals, should become vigilant about verifying information online before passing it along, before our foundations crumble beneath us.