The entire point of advertising is to convince people to buy products or services. Of course, truth in advertising historically has never been a major concern. What is scary is just how much advertising there is these days. If I bullshit you and you bullshit me and we're all sort of believing each other, than as a culture we're all creating an intentional illusion. This isn't like the illusion of life misunderstood or undiscovered. This is an INTENTIONAL illusion. It's like we're all hypnotizing each other, putting each other to sleep. Commerce generates waves of false-consciousness

Can the web be trusted? "You can't believe everything you read" takes on a whole new meaning when it comes to the web.

Not only is text no longer concrete (like in a book or magazine), but there are no longer any filters of publication.

If one wants to publish anything, one just posts it on a free server. It can be truth, lies, or anything in between.

A surfer can even be misdirected to a completely bogus version of an intended website.

Anything can be faked: text, quotations, pictures, sounds, etc. Of course, the media has been feeding the public their version of the truth anyway. This raises the question of just how truthful "truth" is.

Someone might fully intend to tell the absolute truth, but it will still be as the teller sees it. Truth might be thought of as data that can be used to make accurate predictions, but if lies are repeated often enough, they too can become thought of as truth (and so can be used as a predictive tool).

History books are a great example of relative truth as they are constantly being revised.