ネットは信用できるか ― truth-stretching

“嘘をつく”、と表現するのに何通りあるでしょうか？いくつ思い浮かびますか？

ロジェのシソーラス（Roget's Thesaurus）を引くと、“354 FALSENESS”というエントリに、実にたくさんの“嘘をつく”という表現がリストされています。動詞だけを見ても、最も基本的な"lie"に関連する表現だけでも、


exaggerate
deceive
mislead
prevaricate


など多くが載っています。

それらの中の1つに、"stretch the truth"という表現があります。これは真実（truth）を引き伸ばす（stretch）ということですが、婉曲語法というのでしょうか、あるいはほとんど“嘘をつく”と同義なのでしょうか、いずれにしても1点の曇りも無い“真実”とは言えないもののようです。


Everyone knows about the big Internet scams: the e-mails advertising diet pills, the proposed Nigerian bank transfers. But we tend to overlook the milder forms of truth-stretching that have come to shape online living, and it’s hard not to. They’re often perpetuated by big and reputable companies, like Apple, Seamless, and Amazon.

Take search. General search sites, like Google and Bing, are pretty straightforward: you type in a query and get results ranked by some measure of relevance; you also see clearly marked advertisements. This experience tends to shape our expectation that searches deliver relevant results. But the same search on sites like Amazon or Seamless turns up not only relevant results but disguised advertisements, as well. As George Packer recently wrote in the magazine, “Few customers realize that the results generated by Amazon’s search engine are partly determined by promotional fees.” GrubHub Seamless, the merged food-delivery engine, recently revealed in an S.E.C. filing that “restaurants can choose their level of commission rate … to affect their relative priority in sorting algorithms, with restaurants paying higher commission rates generally appearing higher in the search order than restaurants paying lower commission rates.”
(Tim Wu. LITTLE LIES THE INTERNET TOLD ME. The New Yorker. April 17, 2014.)


引用した記事はインターネット上に蔓延る“嘘”に関するものですが、明らかな詐欺（scams）はさておくとして、歪曲された情報にあふれているということを啓蒙するものです。