Misinformation On the Internet

The spread of misinformation on the internet has become more and more rapid over recent years and I think it should be recognized as a serious problem. This can be a very dangerous issue as hundreds of millions of people use the internet each day for information and when things that are untrue get shown, posted, or written on the internet, and people believe it, some really bad things can arise from it. This is important to me because I have always used the internet a lot and with online school I have been having to use it even more than I usually do. So when I see something like a harmful post with misinformation on social media, it concerns me that I am not always aware of digital falsities being shown to me.

A chart showing the concern of internet misformation in different countries

There are many ways to avoid and spot out non credible sources though. A New York Times article writes about ways to recognize misinformation especially for older people as a lot of the time the older demographic are the ones who can be targeted through platforms like Facebook. There is also a lot of concern for the future of information on the web, as pew research center interviewed about one thousand technologists, scholars, practitioners, strategic thinkers and more about this issue and stated: “Some 1,116 responded to this nonscientific canvassing: 51% chose the option that the information environment will not improve.” In other words saying that more than half of the people answering believed that this will be a future problem we won’t be able to fix any time soon. The Government has noticed the rize of digital misinformation as well, shown in an article by trendmicro.com that writes: “Governments are starting to recognize that fake news is something that must be actively fought. Various government agencies are now setting up services to debunk stories that they consider to be false. They are also considering imposing regulations and punishing sites that do publish misinformation.” This could be good for the future and might prevent the problem of misinformation on the web from getting worse.

Chart showing that facebook is the worst social media when it comes to misinformation

This isn’t just an indecipherable problem though, they’re many examples of misinformation you can find. In an article written by Paris Martineau, she goes over and cites many occasions where people had made stuff up and faked numbers for differing reasons. She mentions in 2013 when youtube had to deal with people using bots to fake views. This led to the bots views rivaliving the number of real viewers and youtube had to find a way to step in and stop/get rid of these bots. However a more unique example is shown in a story by the Washington Post titled ‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ comes clean. In this story, a 40 year old man was pretending to be a gay girl protesting in the middle east who was writing about it through blog posts. These blog posts and the gay girl he was pretending to be became a big deal in the media until one day a blog post comes out from her “cousin” saying she had been kidnapped. After a while the American man came clean about himself running the account and admitted that the whole story and girl was all fake. This wasn’t the most dangerous case of misinformation obviously, but it goes to show how easily someone can make something like this up on the internet, which can be really threatening in the wrong hands.

Quote from article talking about false information on the web

After researching all this I have concluded that I had good reasoning to be concerned and it’s easy to see I am not the only one. I have definitely picked up a lot of knowledge about misinformation and how to prevent and notice it, which can probably help me in the future. Overall this is something that I am happy to see being dealt with and pushed back on, but a lot of the articles on this topic are from 2016-2017 and I hope people will continue to care and make an effort to check their sources past the peak of this problem’s media popularity, especially with covid and information about the vaccine.

Annotated bibliography