Thread (sorry): Real investigative journalism is hard. It takes lots of time, skill and money, and the reports it produces are often complex and take some effort to read.

Stories come before official investigations, let alone convictions. They come before we know everything.

That means they're cautious and they don't always have the huge twist yet. But they're how we get the real one dramatic moments – whether on HSBC, Theranos, Wirecard, or any one of dozens of others.

Their success relies on attention, and them leading to demands for action.

That's why conspiratorial threads, alt-media blogposts, and YouTubers "just asking questions" are no friend to real investigation.

They're the junk food equivalent: they're easy and they're quick and they offer a drama hit that real reporting often can't match in the short term.

But they then compete in the same online attention economy, and people get hooked on the conspiracy. Some lose interest in real watchdog reporting because it's less exciting. But otherwise it can just move the news agenda on.

It can even lead to experienced reporters being assigned to show why the latest conspiracy theory isn't true – which can itself be a large and complex reporting task, and takes them away from doing original reporting holding power to account.

So: when you share that conspiracy thread, when you donate to alt-media, when you watch one more YouTube video, you're not scaring people in power or challenging wrongdoing.

You are perpetuating the real wrongness in the world for a junk food version of challenging it.

I wish we lived in a world with so little real political and corporate malfeasance that it made sense for us to make it up.

That is dramatically not the world we're living in. But these fake stories are only making telling the real ones harder.