Cherie Blair would like you to know that she has never gone hunting with Saif Gadhafi. Historian Niall Ferguson so did not get his butt kicked in a debate with economist Paul Krugman. Kate Moss would like it to be known that the "Kate Moss" on Twitter is not the certifiable chain-smoking model, but some sort of poseur.
Or should that be poseuse? Let's ask Edgar Bronfman, whose French is probably decent because he was born in Montreal. At least I thought he was, until he paid a thousand dollars to write this on a website: "Though I am from a Canadian family and for many years was the CEO of a Canadian company, I am an American citizen who was born in New York."
We can thank Sir David Tang for these pointed darts of defensive righteousness. The Hong Kong-born businessman and well-connected restaurateur has just set up iCorrect as a way for his high-profile friends to rebut what they see as the lies and calumny spreading like a gossip rash across the soft belly flesh of the Internet.
For a minor fee of $1,000 ($5,000 for a company), complainants can place their version of events on his small corner of the online world.
So, for those of you who were staying up late worrying about Pierre Trudeau's love life, you may now rest assured that Bianca Jagger never dated him: "I have never met the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau." (As for that marriage to Mick, she is incriminatingly silent.)
Nor, she wants you to understand, did she have an unsuccessful date with Billy Joel that led to his song Big Shot.
Tommy Hilfiger is keen for everyone to know that he does, in fact, want black people to wear his clothes. Kevin Spacey has not hired Kate Moss to play the role of "Nymph" in The Tempest because "there isn't even a role of 'Nymph' in The Tempest." You can almost see him typing "you Philistines" in all caps, then taking a deep breath and deleting it.
Mr. Tang recently told the London Evening Standard that he would like to enlist the non-celebrity aggrieved as well, and to that end will soon be going to New York to recruit more members. "In cyberspace, 95 per cent of what you read is hearsay," he said, using an unverifiable statistic to contribute unwittingly to his own problem. "There must be a space out there for misrepresentations to be corrected."
Crucially, iCorrect does not fact-check the counterclaims made by its clients. So when Mr. Ferguson insists that a reviewer who panned his latest book did not read it or that he did not get trounced in a debate with Mr. Krugman, you can never be sure whether it's the whiff of righteous indignation or the tang of sour grapes you're smelling.
In this way, iCorrect differs from the wonderful work in lie-correcting and error-uncovering that goes on, free of charge, all over the Internet. So, yes, you don't need to look far to find any old pile of nonsense - Lady Gaga is really Ed Asner, Barack Obama once shared a halal kebab with Osama bin Laden while Henry Kissinger took pictures - but there is a valiant effort going on to pile bricks of veracity upon this steaming mound.
If you'd like non-partisan fact-checking of urban myths or political rhetoric or campaign promises, you only have to go to websites such as Snopes.com or FactCheck.org or Fullfact.org, where a few dedicated number-crunchers toil (under bare fluorescent tubes, I like to imagine, and nearly buried under a mountain of Subway wrappers) to strip away cant and propaganda and reveal the truth within.
At Sense About Science, a team of volunteer scientists struggle, soberly and rationally, to correct the worst of the scare-mongering that appears in the popular press. Last summer, for example, confronted with a report in the Daily Telegraph that suggested shopping receipts could make men impotent, an endocrinologist from the group rebutted the limpness of the claim.
Also, in case you were wondering, magnets in your underpants are not likely to reduce the symptoms of menopause.
True, none of these issues is going to attract quite the same amount of attention as the news that Cherie Blair will soon appear in spangly tights and a leotard on Strictly Come Dancing (a claim she paid a grand to refute on iCorrect, with lawyerly skill).