The web is voracious. It gobbles up stories, themes and memes like a monster from outer space. With the merest puff of wind to launch them, a bewildering slew of tales take off, powered by the perpetual motion of repetition.

The Guardian was among a crowd that made the mistake of filling the sails of one of the weirder stories to take off in this way. The article appeared on the Shortcuts blog. It aims to be a fast-paced humorous column, which is described as "trending topics and news analysis".

The headline on the story, posted on 14 June 2013, is: "Eyeball-licking: the fetish that is making Japanese teenagers sick". The author explains that the article will be about "oculolinctus, an eye-licking fetish that is currently sweeping across the schools of Japan like, well, like a great big dirty bacteria-coated tongue sweeping across a horrific number of adolescent eyeballs … oculolinctus is being blamed for a significant rise in Japanese cases of conjunctivitis and eye-chlamydia … It's apparently seen as a new second-base; the thing you graduate to when kissing gets boring."

He goes on to say that the craze may have been started by a music video made by a Japanese band called Born. He wrote: "Tumblr, inevitably, is filling up with drawings and unnecessarily close-up photographs of the act, and YouTube is no stranger either."

The story was indeed all over the web, on the sites of mainstream news and independent websites alike.

The man who punctured the credibility of the story is Mark Schreiber, a journalist, author and translator who has lived in Japan since 1965. He contacted three Japanese professional organisations, including two ophthalmological associations and an organisation of school clinicians. They knew nothing about any such craze. He wrote about his findings in Number 1 Shimbun, the Foreign Correspondents' Club of Japan's monthly magazine.

In his article, he wrote: "Debunking an anonymous, unattributed story may be impossible, but it was not especially difficult to at least cast doubts on the sweeping claim that large numbers of Japanese adolescents were suffering from an epidemic of tongue-induced pink eye, as the blogs were now claiming.

"Convinced at this point that the story was based on a hoax, I fired off emails to editors who saw fit to run the story, at Raw Story, the SF Chronicle, the Syracuse Post-Standard, Shanghailist and several others," he wrote.

"A few responded. None of them were prompted to remove the story from their site. 'We didn't write the story, dude. It's a syndicated story,' was how Raw Story's editor responded, advising me that if it was good enough for the Guardian, it was good enough for her."

In most cases that is the kind of reputation the Guardian would seek. Not in this one. In a limited search, I can't find any verifiable evidence that there ever was such an "epidemic".

Schreiber wrote to the Guardian readers' editor on 23 June to explain that Raw Story's editor refused to take the story down because we had not. I overlooked that email in the face of what appeared more pressing problems – my mistake.

Stuart Heritage, the author of the Guardian article, has apologised. But editors are also responsible and, notwithstanding the web's especially insistent time pressures, should have encouraged him to take a more sceptical approach.

He said: "I think the tight deadline might have caused me to be a little careless here – the story had already been reported at the Huffington Post and the National Student, before other mainstream outlets picked it up. A few days after that, I was asked to write about it. My checks were limited to searches of Tumblr and YouTube, which seemed to confirm the craze's veracity.

"Both sites are linked to in the piece.

"My intention was to comment on the coverage, and not the eyeball-licking itself, but in all the hurry I think I might have fumbled it."

Schreiber concluded his article by quoting a Japan-based UK correspondent who said he couldn't imagine that "journalists who write blogs, contribute as freelancers, etc, are held to different editorial standards than staff and other full-time writers". Schreiber went on: "Tracking this story from its source to its audience has convinced me otherwise."

Complaints of this nature are rare but on this occasion we fell into the trap. We will remove the story from the site.