1) you know where lies come from: people you know. Therefore you can trust people who tell the same lies.
2) you can trust people who believe your lies because believing lies is more expensive than going with the truth, because expensive signals are harder to fake.
3) the truth hurts. No one wants to follow someone who hurts them. We prefer to follow people who lie to us so we will feel better.
Truth seldom makes for a good product. Fiction can be optimally thrilling, engaging, easy to understand, intuitive, and on-message. The truth is whatever it is. With great skill one can make a messy truth easier to understand and more plausible... but what for truth takes great effort to construct is nearly automatic for fiction.
I'd say there's also an element of enjoying a narrative, whether we call them memes or myths, that is satisfying and fits a story we know.
Some time around 2000 I started seeing most news (especially long form) through this lens and I discount/research it a bit more the more it follows a standard narrative. Usually, it's a sign that facts have been cherry picked or out of context to fit, thought that's not always the case. It's rare that there's a story (or scientific research) that doesn't have some warts and things that don't fit, and to me those aspects are part of what give it a ring of authenticity... although they are also falsifiable.
Many current memes (and science press releases) are terribly simplistic and made for those who truly don't care about truth, but are looking for that hit of satisfaction of discovering they were always right.
I find memes to be often low effort half/quarter-truths or no truth at all and their humor lies within the irony that they aren't true at all. What is the impact on society when people in masses are consuming and entertaining themselves with this "content"?
- a humorous image, video, piece of text, etc., that is copied (often with slight variations) and spread rapidly by Internet users.
- an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation.
The former refers to things like the sometimes clever pictures you see on social media, the latter refers to things like what you read in the newspaper (often referred to as facts), but both kinds have widely varying levels of truth.
1) you know where lies come from: people you know. Therefore you can trust people who tell the same lies.
2) you can trust people who believe your lies because believing lies is more expensive than going with the truth, because expensive signals are harder to fake.
3) the truth hurts. No one wants to follow someone who hurts them. We prefer to follow people who lie to us so we will feel better.