It was in the paper, so it must be true?
The internet has quickly become the main source of news and information to a large proportion of the worlds population. I can’t remember when I last bought a newspaper, and my first task of the day before I begin work is always to check out the BBC News site and see what’s going on in the world. I try to keep up to date with current affairs, and I try to understand why they are happening. After I have done this I’ll then form an opinion.
So, having all of this information at our fingertips within a few seconds is undoubtedly a good thing. Or is it? I’ve noticed quite a lot of instances over the last few months where many people are happy to accept things on the web as fact without even considering whether they are actually true or not. Whilst I’m not suggesting that we should question absolutely everything we read, I think that we should be more careful and certainly not take it as gospel.
Whatever you read on the web is often going to be someone’s opinion. The reader will then form an opinion from that opinion, and the cycle goes on. Before we know it we’re reading articles which contain very few accurate facts, and sometimes just blatant lies, but we just accept them as being true.
One of the worst culprits is social media, and in particular Facebook. There are numerous ‘fan pages’ around which many users have signed up to (some numbering hundreds of thousands) which are completely inaccurate. Let me give you an example. One of the most common themes is the ‘fact’ that Facebook are to begin charging users for access to the website in the middle of 2010. The charge varies from £3.99 to £14.99 per month, but they all have a similar message, something like:
We Will Not Pay To Use Facebook. We Are Gone If This Happens
(36,500 members)
. . . or . . .
I will not pay £3.99 a month to use Facebook from July 9th 2010
(711,000 members)
. . . or . . .
We’re against the £4.99 a month charge for Facebook from June 30th 2010
(110,000 members before being shut down after attempting to infect PC’s with malware)
The official Facebook line? Try this:
Question: Does Facebook plan on charging a membership fee? Over three-quarters of its users are going into a panic-induced assumption that this is true, even though there hasn’t been talk of a membership fee from the business press or Facebook itself. So can you calm the panic?
Answer: The answer is no, we are not planning on charging a basic fee for our basic services. Once again, that question stems from people thinking we’re growing so quickly we’re running out of money. We’re growing really quickly, but we can finance that growth. We’re not going to charge for our basic services.
It took me around one minute to find evidence to prove that there isn’t going to be a charge for Facebook, so why have nearly one million people blindly accepted this as fact without question just because somebody said so, with a few of them becoming quite angry at the prospect? So why do these groups appear? More often that not it starts with a sensationalist headline which results in the maximum number of people joining the group. These people are then subjected to any marketing message that the group admins decide to post, as these posts now appear on their Facebook walls. In the grand scheme of things this isn’t really that important, but it shows the potential of misinformation spreading via the internet.
There was a rumour spread that US President Barack Obama was a muslim and was sworn in on the Koran. In a poll conducted by CBS it was found that 7% of those interviewed believed that this was true. This doesn’t sound like it really matters until you consider that 45% of Americans stated that they would be less likely to vote for a candidate if they knew he or she was a muslim. It got to the stage where the President actually had to make a statement informing people that he was in fact a Christian and was sworn in on the Bible.
I quite often see people posting comments on social networking sites such as Facebook which contain few facts. Often they are opinions formed from assumptions or half truths, sometimes just from ignorance, but in almost all cases a few minutes looking around the web for evidence from credible sources would set the record straight and give them a fuller understanding of why things have happened or what the real facts of a situation are. This is where the true value of the internet really comes through.
I believe that we must take responsibility for the information we spread on the web. We have to check the facts, and be able to verify them from credible sources. We can say what we think, and we can certainly have an opinion, but too often people will simply accept what they read as the truth without questioning, and I find this worrying.
It would be appropriate I guess to state my sources for this article!
