So I grew up around creationists. When I presented this idea, the only attempt at a justification I heard was something like “in the original Hebrew the word for a literal day was used, that’s how we know creation happened in literal 6 days”

Which baffled me enough to shut me up, so that guy probably thinks he convinced me.

The Federation would never publish fake data, so it must be true!

If it were convincing lies made to deceive, then sure. But in this case the papers were deliberately made to be immediately obviously fake, to anyone actually reading them.

So I guess the question would be “would humans do the same thing if someone literally writes obvious jokes on the internet?”