There’s an account on Instagram called World

Record Egg. It began with a picture of an egg and a post that read: “Let’s set a world record together and get the most liked post on Instagram. Beating the current world record held by Kylie Jenner (18 million)! We got this.” Within ten days, the world record had been beaten. Forty-eight hours after that, the egg had passed 45 million likes.

“Fifty years ago, how do you think someone got a message in

front of 45 million people?” asks InternetNZ policy advisor Nicola Brown. “It just wasn’t possible. Now you can get 45 million people to unite over one thing in a matter of days.”

It was a harmless egg that broke records on Instagram, but what if the post had been a lie? Say, for instance, it said that eggs were really bad for us. What do you think the effects would be? Say the lie was about a person. Imagine the damage that could do.

“If I can get 45 million people to believe a lie, I am in an incredibly powerful position,” says Brown. “Fifty years ago, I would not have had that power. I could only have lied in tiny increments, and it would have been very hard to get away with it.”

Thanks to the internet, spreading false information – or “fake news” – has become easier than ever.