Why Not Just Lie?

The Economics of Falsehood

Anyone who knows me knows I am an unapologetic Lionel Messi supporter.

For the better part of the last six years, I have probably watched every official match Argentina has played, including World Cup qualifiers, Copa América, the Finalissima, and the tournament itself.

If Argentina were playing at two in the morning, as they did more than once during the recently concluded World Cup, chances are I was awake for it. Argentina's World Cup win in Qatar in 2022 remains one of the most memorable days of my life so far, and I have followed the little magician across continents, supporting Barcelona, PSG, and Inter Miami at various points because of him. Watching him play football has been a privilege.

With that background stated, let me begin with an admission that might surprise some readers.

Argentina fully deserved to lose this year's World Cup final. Spain was the better side, and not by a close margin. Argentina were slow to start throughout the tournament, as they usually are, but in the final they were unusually lethargic, struggled to impose themselves for long stretches, and lost to the superior team on the day.

Football has never promised fairy tales, and no amount of admiration for Messi should stop anyone from acknowledging what happened on the pitch. Argentina's goalkeeper, Emiliano “Dibu” Martinez, kept the gap from growing wider than it already was.

That, however, is not what prompted this essay.

As Argentina stumbled and then somehow fought their way through the tournament, I found myself spending nearly as much time on social media debunking things as I spent watching football.

My feed filled with incidents that never happened, quotes that were never said, and controversies that existed only because someone had decided they ought to. An AI-generated image circulated showing FIFA president Gianni Infantino injecting Lionel Messi's arm with performance-enhancing drugs.

A fabricated clip of Julián Álvarez performing a provocative goal celebration racked up millions of views before FIFA's own team confirmed it was synthetic. Ordinary moments from real matches were stripped of context and reassembled into evidence for conclusions people had already reached before a ball was kicked.

None of this was necessary. Football had supplied plenty of material for debate, Argentina's tactical victories and missteps, and the final itself, more than enough to argue over honestly. Reality, apparently, wasn't dramatic enough.

Where the facts failed to sustain a preferred narrative, fiction stepped in to finish the job.

By the end of the tournament, worn out from explaining the same fabrications to the same people, I found myself asking a bigger question. Not whether this was peculiar to football, because it clearly isn't, but whether it has become our default response to any inconvenient reality: if the truth won't cooperate, why not just lie?

II. We Have Always Lied

There is nothing uniquely modern about lying. Human beings have lied for as long as they have spoken, embellishing achievements, concealing failures, and breaking promises.

Governments have manufactured propaganda, businesses have misled consumers, newspapers have published falsehoods, and wars have been justified on claims that later proved exaggerated or invented. The Spanish-American War of 1898 is often cited as a case where journalistic fabrication around the sinking of the USS Maine helped manufacture public appetite for conflict.

My old civics teacher used to say that human beings have been liberal with the truth since the dawn of time, and she wasn't wrong.

So if lying is this old, why does this moment feel different? The explanation is economic.

III. The Price of a Lie

For most of recorded history, lies were expensive, especially at scale. Fabricating a convincing lie demanded forged documents, manipulated photographs, a sympathetic publisher, a state broadcaster, or some institution powerful enough to distribute and sustain the deception. Even rumors relied on people physically carrying them from place to place.

Manipulating reality was difficult because reality itself was difficult to counterfeit, and truth held a real economic advantage: it was usually cheaper to just tell it. Reality had already happened. The liar had to recreate it, bend it, distort it, and then plant that distortion in enough minds to matter, all before anyone checked. That asymmetry imposed limits, and most lies simply weren't worth the effort.

Those limits no longer exist, not because people suddenly became less honest, but because technology changed the economics of communication.

That change has been, in many ways, genuinely democratic. For centuries, the ability to shape public opinion belonged to whoever controlled the presses, the broadcast towers, and the publishing houses.

Newspapers decided which stories mattered, producers decided whose voices reached a national audience, and governments often held enormous sway over both, so most information flowed from a small number of centralized sources.

Most people could speak, but very few could be heard beyond their own street. The internet dismantled a large part of that.

In 2026, a student in Lagos, a dissident in Tehran, or a citizen journalist in Minneapolis can reach audiences that would once have been unthinkable, all without a newsroom's permission. Expertise no longer requires institutional approval, marginalized communities have found platforms, and governments have lost much of their old monopoly over information. Public debate has become more participatory and more immediate, and that is worth taking seriously as a genuine gain.

But every redistribution of power creates new imbalances alongside the ones it resolves. The same platforms that empower whistleblowers to expose corruption make it just as easy for an anonymous account to fabricate evidence. The same AI that translates languages, restores old photographs, and speeds up scientific research can generate video of events that never happened. The barrier to joining the public conversation has collapsed, and so has the barrier to manufacturing something convincingly false.

What hasn't changed is the cost of truth. Someone still has to witness an event, another has to verify it, journalists still have to investigate it, and courts still have to weigh the evidence. Reality remains stubbornly indifferent to what we'd prefer it to be.

Falsehood, on the other hand, has become remarkably cheap. And when the cost of producing something collapses while demand for it stays constant, economics offers only one outcome: we get more of it.

IV. The Trump Experiment

If the digital age transformed the economics of falsehood, Donald Trump may be its most consequential political practitioner. It is prudent to note before going into this section that Trump did not invent political lying. Politicians have long exaggerated achievements, downplayed failures, and made promises they knew they couldn't keep. After all, the image of the dodgy, morally flexible politician is a near-universal figure across cultures and centuries, from ancient Rome to modern parliaments.

What distinguished Trump was his apparent indifference to whether a claim had already been disproved. In an earlier media environment, a demonstrably false statement risked prompt exposure and abandonment. Trump often did the opposite, repeating disputed claims with enough consistency that the repetition itself became part of their persuasive force.

The clearest example remains his insistence that the 2020 election was stolen, his defining lie. Election officials from both parties found no evidence of fraud on the scale claimed, and courts across the country rejected every serious attempt to overturn the result. The claim nonetheless continued to resonate with millions of Americans.

Psychologists call the underlying mechanism the illusory truth effect: repeated statements start to feel more believable simply because they've become familiar, regardless of whether they're true. Repetition quietly substitutes for verification.

Whether Trump understood this mechanism consciously is impossible to know. What's clear is that the modern information environment let a claim survive long after the evidence against it had become overwhelming.

Once I recognized that pattern, I realized it wasn't confined to politics. Watching the World Cup unfold this summer, I saw the same phenomenon in a very different arena, only this time the raw material wasn't speeches and election claims but football matches, AI-generated videos, and millions of supporters eager to believe what they'd already decided was true.

V. Manufacturing the Crime

“Show me the man and I'll show you the crime.”

The line is often attributed to Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's chief of secret police, and its exact origin matters less than the method it describes: begin with guilt, then build the case backward from the conclusion you've already decided on. That was the pattern running through this year's World Cup.

Long before the final, before Argentina eventually lost to Spain, social media had become a factory for realities that never existed. A video appeared to show Messi deliberately stamping on England full-back Djed Spence's foot during the semi-final match. It never happened; the edit was exposed when people noticed the fabricator had changed Spence's shirt number in the process.

Another clip purported to show Messi diving against Switzerland. Also fabricated. An AI-generated image showed FIFA president Gianni Infantino and Lionel Messi in what was, ostensibly, some sort of clandestine meeting, and a separate image claimed to show the referee for the England match posing for a photo with Messi after the final whistle, evidence, supposedly, of favoritism, except the photo had actually been taken years earlier at a different match entirely and was simply recirculated with a new caption.

A video also circulated, supposedly of Gianni Infantino visibly frustrated after Argentina conceded a goal in the final, only for it to once again be debunked as an old video.

Some of this was crude and easy to debunk. Some of it was remarkably convincing. Together, it created the impression that controversy trailed almost every Argentine result, and that impression fed a wave of anti-Argentina sentiment that ran through the tournament until the final whistle.

What fascinated me wasn't that fabrications existed; every major tournament attracts rumor and conspiracy, and some of these same allegations against Argentina date back to their run to the title in 2022.

What fascinated me was why they existed. Argentina didn't need to commit those offenses for people to believe they had. Messi didn't need to say any of the words attributed to him for millions to react as though he had. The content wasn't gathering evidence toward a conclusion.

It was manufacturing evidence for a conclusion that had already been reached, every fabricated clip another exhibit, every invented quote another confession, all pointing toward a verdict decided long before a ball was kicked.

In the days after the final, one report suggested the Argentine Football Association was weighing legal action over the coordinated wave of manipulated video and fabricated quotes aimed at its players, a claim I couldn't independently confirm through the AFA itself at time of writing. Whether that materializes into an actual case is almost beside the point.

That a national football association would even contemplate legal remedies against a network of manufactured falsehoods says something about the age we're in. Indeed, it got so prominent that even the national team coach, Lionel Scaloni, and its captain, Lionel Messi, were quizzed about it in separate press conferences.

For centuries, evidence led to conclusions; that's the basic architecture of investigation, journalism, and due process. Increasingly, the arrow points the other way: the conclusion comes first, and evidence gets shaped, selected, or invented afterward to support it.

VI. Minds Built for a Different World

It would be comforting to believe misinformation succeeds because large numbers of people are uninformed, uneducated, or incapable of critical thought. I'd argue otherwise.

The human mind didn't evolve to navigate an endless stream of algorithmically curated content, AI-generated media, and millions of competing claims arriving every day. It evolved in a world where information traveled slowly, communities were small, and most important claims could be tested against direct experience. There was less to process and far fewer opinions competing for space on any given day. Our instincts have changed far less than the world around them.

Psychologists have spent decades studying the mental shortcuts we use to make sense of information. Confirmation bias makes us pay closer attention to evidence supporting what we already believe and treat contradictory evidence with more skepticism. The illusory truth effect makes repeated claims feel more credible simply because they're familiar.

Motivated reasoning describes how we evaluate the same facts differently depending on whether they reinforce or threaten a conclusion we've already reached. None of these are flaws confined to certain kinds of people; they're ordinary features of human cognition, and they help explain why intelligent, thoughtful people can look at the same evidence and land in very different places.

These tendencies aren't products of the internet; they've always existed. What's changed is the environment they now operate in. Information reaches us faster, in greater volume, with fewer natural opportunities for verification than at any point in history, and algorithms have become remarkably good at learning what captures our attention and serving us more of it.

Artificial intelligence has accelerated that further, making it possible to produce persuasive text, images, and video at a speed that would once have seemed impossible. My friend and I can have the same app, say TikTok, open it at the same rate every day, and see almost entirely different feeds, curated not to inform us but to keep us scrolling, liking, commenting, and feeding the algorithm more of whatever already holds their attention.

The result is an information environment that rewards familiarity, confidence, and emotional resonance over accuracy. Ideas that affirm what a community already believes spread easily inside it, while ideas that challenge those beliefs face a much steeper climb.

That's part of why correcting misinformation is so difficult. By the time a false claim has been disproved, it's often become tangled up with identity and belonging, and rejecting it can feel less like accepting new evidence and more like distancing yourself from your own community or admitting your judgment was wrong in the first place. Ego doesn't help at all.

That's likely why so many of the fabricated videos from this World Cup landed as well as they did. They didn't need to persuade anyone of something new; they mostly reinforced beliefs people already held. The technology just supplied evidence for a conclusion that was already convenient.

VII. Subsidising Falsehood

Every significant technological advance changes more than the technology itself, it changes the incentives around it. When books became cheaper to print, literacy expanded. When cameras became affordable, photography stopped being the preserve of professionals.

When the internet tore down the barriers to publishing, millions of people who'd never had a public voice found one. Each of those shifts brought real benefits, and each also altered its environment in ways nobody fully anticipated. The same is true of information.

When the cost of producing believable falsehoods collapses, the consequences reach far beyond whoever created them; they're felt most by institutions that depend on a shared understanding of reality.

Journalism is perhaps the obvious case. Reporting has always meant separating fact from rumor, but that task gets far harder when fabricated photographs, cloned voices, and AI-generated video can appear online before a reporter even reaches the scene.

Verification takes time by nature, but fabrication increasingly doesn't.

The law faces a version of the same problem. Courts have always had to determine what happened, but they're now doing it in a world where digital evidence can't be accepted at face value, a recording may be genuine or synthetic, and a photograph may document an event or may have been generated by software with no event behind it at all. The legal system will adapt, as it always has, but every new layer of uncertainty raises the cost of getting to the truth.

The same pressure runs through politics, business, and ordinary life. Elections become easier to influence with manufactured narratives. Companies find their reputations threatened by fabricated announcements or manipulated recordings. A convincing lie can now cross the world before the person it's about even learns it exists.

The greatest cost is harder to measure: trust.

Every society runs on a baseline amount of it: the assumption that a photograph generally depicts what it claims to, that a recorded conversation actually happened, that when enough independent sources describe the same event, there's a reasonable chance it happened as described.

None of those assumptions was ever infallible, but together they made cooperation possible. When they start to weaken, we lose certainty about what's true, not only what's false. Authentic evidence starts competing with fabricated evidence on equal footing, and genuine recordings risk getting dismissed as fake simply because convincing fakes now exist.

A world saturated with misinformation doesn't just make lies easier to spread; it makes the truth easier to doubt.

VIII. The Limits of the Law

For lawyers, the instinct to solve problems through regulation is an understandable one.

When a new technology creates harm, we look for rules to reduce it, and artificial intelligence is already prompting real discussion about mandatory watermarking, disclosure requirements, criminal liability for malicious deepfakes, and greater responsibility for digital platforms.

Many of these proposals deserve serious thought. But it would be a mistake to treat this as a legal problem waiting on a legal solution.

The difficulty starts with a deceptively simple question: who decides what's true?

In the straightforward cases, the answer is obvious enough. A fabricated video presented as authentic can cause real harm, the same way forged documents and fraudulent impersonation always have, and the law has always had a role in addressing those wrongs.

The harder cases rarely stay so clean. Public debate is full of contested interpretations, uncertain facts, evolving science, and genuine political disagreement. Democracies depend on the freedom to hold unpopular opinions, challenge prevailing narratives, and criticize power.

Any legal regime broad enough to eliminate falsehood entirely would almost certainly eliminate a great deal of legitimate disagreement along with it.

Free speech is a foundational commitment of democratic life for everyone, not a privilege extended only to people saying comfortable things. Take it away, and a central pillar of that life goes with it, pushing government toward authoritarianism rather than away from it.

History has no shortage of governments that claimed to be protecting truth while suppressing dissent, and the power to decide what may be said rarely stays confined to deliberate lies. It expands, inevitably, to uncomfortable opinions, inconvenient reporting, and ideas that whoever holds power would rather not hear. That's why the answer can't simply be more censorship.

The same technologies that made deception easier have democratized speech in extraordinary ways, letting whistleblowers expose corruption, letting citizens document abuses that would otherwise stay hidden, and letting voices outside traditional media into public life. Those gains matter, and giving them up lightly would cost more than it saves.

The real task is holding onto both truth and freedom at once, which asks more of institutions than choosing one would. That means better verification, stronger institutions, more responsible platforms, and, above all, citizens willing to resist believing something just because it confirms what they already want to be true.

Law has an important role in that effort. It cannot be the only one.

IX. Why Not Just Lie?

Convincing falsehoods can now be produced in minutes, they travel further than corrections ever do, and millions of people are ready to believe them before anyone examines the evidence. Put plainly, lying is no longer just the act of saying something untrue. It is increasingly an attempt to replace reality itself.

For most of human history, reality held one decisive advantage over fiction: it was the only version available. People disagreed constantly about what events meant, arguing over motives, responsibility, and consequences. Politicians distorted facts, propagandists manufactured narratives, and newspapers got stories wrong.

But underneath all of that sat a stable assumption: that the event itself happened only once and that, however imperfectly people understood it, a reality existed against which competing claims could eventually be measured. That assumption has quietly shaped nearly every institution we've built.

Courts exist because facts matter. Science advances because experiments can be repeated against an objective reality. Journalists investigate because events leave evidence behind. Democracies survive because citizens can argue over competing visions of society while still sharing enough agreement about the world they actually inhabit to make those arguments mean something.

Artificial intelligence hasn't abolished reality; reality remains as stubbornly indifferent to our preferences as it always was. What it's done is make synthetic versions of reality extraordinarily cheap to produce and astonishingly easy to distribute.

Reality has one property that falsehood doesn't: it happens exactly once. It can't be regenerated with a better prompt, edited to favor a preferred candidate, or rewritten to flatter an athlete people admire. It doesn't care whether it confirms anyone's politics, loyalties, or grievances; it simply is what it was.

Falsehood carries none of those constraints. It can be revised indefinitely until it feels more emotionally satisfying than the truth, borrow the face of a public figure or the voice of a trusted friend, and be tailored precisely to whichever audience, prejudice, or algorithm it needs to move. In a world where attention is scarce and outrage pays, a good fabrication often arrives looking more convincing than the truth it's replacing.

People will always lie; that isn't going to change and never has. The real question this moment raises is whether we still treat reality as something to be discovered or whether we've started treating it as something to be manufactured on demand.

Lose that distinction and the damage runs well past misinformation. Courts grow less certain of their evidence. Journalism grows less capable of verifying anything before publication. Scientific consensus becomes easier to wave away, and democratic disagreement becomes harder to sustain, because citizens no longer start from a shared account of what actually happened.

What's lost isn't just truth in the abstract. It's the common reality that trust, law, history, and public life are all built on top of.

Every civilization rests upon a simple, often unnoticed premise: that reality is not negotiable. We may dispute its meaning, argue over its consequences, and struggle to uncover it, but we do not create it by preference alone, and while technology has not changed that premise, it has certainly made forgetting it easier.

The responsibility before us, then, is not merely to defend the truth. It is to defend the idea that there is a truth to defend.