> I'm curious what commenters here think should be done about this, if anything?
Easy. Don't believe everything you hear/read on the Internet. If some random Internet commenter is telling you about the secret torture dungeons in the basement of a pizza place that doesn't even have a basement, you should be able to readily conclude that they're just making $#!+ up.
Sure, this is the desirable solution. But...your example, people did believe it. So is it not as easy as we'd like? Or as a society, what do we do when this easy bar is not being met by our friends, neighbors, relatives?
But I'd also argue that if the owner of a pizza shop has an Instagram feed full of disturbing imagery of children and child-related "art" ( https://archive.ph/9FN8nhttps://archive.ph/5UecO ) and their social network graph is full of convicted pedophiles, sex traffickers, and powerful people supporting media and the political class ( https://archive.ph/o0Hf0 )......maybe, just maybe, we should put some effort into proper criminal investigation of them all instead of dismissing the whole thing because an overzealous citizen honed in on one majorly-wrong detail and skipped straight to vigilantism?
Easy. Don't believe everything you hear/read on the Internet. If some random Internet commenter is telling you about the secret torture dungeons in the basement of a pizza place that doesn't even have a basement, you should be able to readily conclude that they're just making $#!+ up.