So we're talking about an ends-justify-means scenario here.

I guess we are. But, I don't think that "raising awareness" is a valid excuse for making up stories or flat out lying. It's just that, for me, it takes a little off the evilness of the lying. I look at the authors/lies a little differently if it was done to raise awareness than if it was done for fun or to maliciously harm someone or for the author's own sadistic pleasure.

There's far too much extant injustice in the world to get hung up on made up shit. And frankly? If I'm going to read a made-up story about a Russian chick who rides her Ninja around Chernobyl, it'd better be way more fucking AWESOME than kidofspeed.

I agree with this 100%. You obviously know much more about this particular stories and others. From my perspective as someone who is slightly educated about Chernobyl and has no interest in bikes, this story shed light on something that I knew little about. I really didn't care about the bike part as much as I did about the photographs and the story.

So while you look at this story and others as part of a larger part of your knowledge on the subject, on writing, and on bikers, I look at it as something that sparked a long moment of entertainment and fascination. I read the entirety of the wikipedia link on Chernobyland Roentgens while reading her story. That's one of the key features of the internet that I love: instant delivery of education about random topics I wouldn't otherwise learn about. So for me this delivered exactly what I wanted.

To you, the story didn't deliver or the extending circumstances diminished heavily from the story because you care and know about a lot more than me. You know about writing. You know about bike culture. You know about the impact this story had on how other pieces of non-fiction are judged. You know about the story that wasn't told. You know about the fact that this story made a bunch of people turning into wannabe radiation-humping badasses.

Now that I've had this conversation with you, I care about those things too. I understand the negative impact a story like this can have on all sorts of things.

Fake or overly embellished stories cause more harm than good in the end. While they can be educating and fascinating, they should be called out for their flaws so that we don't end up in a world where they are accepted. We should continue to differentiate between fiction and non-fiction in the strictest sense because if we don't we won't be able to tell whether we read something real or fake.

I don't want to live in a world where we are overly skeptical of everything we read because of incidents like this. For some reason, while writing this, my mind keeps going back to reddit. This exact thing has happened on reddit to the detriment of actual true stories. It is nearly impossible to read anything over there because every story is read with the perception that it probably isn't true. This takes away from the emotional ride of reading a great piece of writing but also has caused great harm (doxxing, shunning, etc) to people with real conditions or stories that should be heard about. You can't read about someone's cancer experience anymore because of the overly skeptical nature of reddit. Not that I want a bunch of cancer sob stories. But that kind of sucks.