As passengers stare, unable to reconcile the banal reality of the afternoon with the impossible arrival of a suicide bomber, the man, grinning bizarrely, shouts: "I'm going to blow myself up!"Some passengers scream. Some begin to cry. The man continues to threaten, still grinning.I believe that South Africa's current outbreak is more sinister than commercial click-baitingJust then a police car arrives and armed officers pile out, yelling orders and pointing assault weapons at him. He stops smiling and hastily takes off the bomb rig.Frightened, he starts yelling, "It's satire! The bomb's not real! I'm doing satire!"He's deranged, right? Nobody could believe that telling a lie, without irony, subtext or humour, to cause fear and potentially trigger a violent response, could ever qualify as satire.And yet that's what I'm seeing, almost every day, on the internet.The fake news pandemic has started in South Africa, and instead of calling it what it is - shouting "Bomb!" on a crowded bus, deserving swift and merciless retribution from the legal system - it is being excused as "satire" by people who clearly believe that satire means "making up stuff" rather than using irony, mockery or humour to point out the vices or wickedness of the powerful.I'm not going to name the sites at the vanguard of this onslaught because I believe they need to be starved of oxygen. Also, you already know them: your friends have been posting them onto your Facebook feed, reacting to the news that Jacob Zuma has collapsed or that the DA has vowed to fire all black employees in Nelson Mandela Bay.Of course, wildly fictional drivel has been a hallmark of the internet since its inception. The lunatic fringe, managing to be both as pedantic and prescriptive as a teenaged collector of superhero figurines and as vague and contradictory as a drunk uncle presenting his world view, has always lurked just a few clicks away. And it's had incredible stamina: there are web pages about lizard people with a longer and prouder history than the Huffington Post. Sometimes with better reporting, too.The problem, though, is that that paranoid, endlessly creative creature has escaped from the zoo. It's snuck into the suburbs and is breeding with your poodle. And the puppies are bouncing up everywhere.For what it's worth, I believe that South Africa's current outbreak is more sinister than commercial click-baiting. I have a feeling that whoever is responsible is making a small fortune from clicks but a large fortune from powerful paymasters who have mandated them to muddy the waters with a campaign of intense, fairly co-ordinated disinformation.The timing of this upsurge might be coincidental, but I find it interesting that we're starting to doubt everything we read online just as the ANC loses support by its largest margin ever. After all, if you can't control the national conversation any more, surely second prize is to turn it into a cacophony of competing whoops and screams in which nobody can be right and, therefore, nobody can be wrong.The media, too, must carry plenty of responsibility for the current crisis of authenticity. The whole thing was holed below the waterline the moment news organisations began reporting on celebrity gossip as information worth knowing. (The Kardashian-Industrial Complex is what happens when people who know better give people who don't know better exactly what they think they want.) The moment you know your preferred news organisation is publishing "stories" cooked up by PR gurus, doled out to lackey publicists, and then "leaked" to completely undiscerning news wires, how can you fully believe its front-page exposé on some political scandal?I don't know how the South African media industry is going to put the fake news genie back in the bottle. Draconian laws around news production will inevitably be used against legitimate journalists by a government desperate for an excuse to gag independent voices.But we do have a problem, and we need to be aware that if we don't tackle it, we're going to find ourselves in an appalling national crisis. With news even partially discredited, we'd never believe reports about the next Nkandla, or the next Marikana, or the results of the next election. We'd be lost, adrift in a typhoon of noise and contradiction and hearsay, without a clue where we were or which direction we needed to go to find salvation.When you print fake banknotes you go to jail because you've undermined trust in your country's currency, and without trust in its inherent value, money becomes worthless. Fake news should be treated exactly the same way. Counterfeit information undermines our faith in our institutions, in our news gatherers, even in each other. Worse, it undermines our faith in our own critical faculties. And once we lose that, we're done...