Sins of the Internet
I love the Internet, it is chuck full of information. Just about anything you can think of is listed somewhere in the Internet’s vast cumulative hoards of data. Using Apple Siri, Google’s searching engine by saying “OK Google” and even Microsoft’s voice controlled Cortana have certainly made searching the web even easier. It is not uncommon to see someone say something and then the cell phones come out and people search to see if what the person said was accurate. When something like this happens in gatherings of family and friends I can’t help but think it is a rude thing to do. Who cares if someone in that position misstates something? There is a bigger point I am trying to make here.
The point I am trying to make is not everything posted on the Internet is true and yet so many people accept what they see as gospel. The other day I was on Facebook and someone posted the most horrible photo of a man scantily dressed and covered in dirt who was screaming in excruciating pain as he was being held down by Mideastern looking men who were using an electric cattle prod on his private parts. The picture was posted as that of J. Christopher Stevens, our former Ambassador who was in the Benghazi compound when he was killed by Islamic militants. The problem was this heinous photo was not that of Stevens, it was a photo which was around the Internet since 2009 and had to do with violence in Spain. The face of the tortured individual could not be seen clearly. I am sure the person who put this photo up believed it was Stevens, because it had said it was when it was posted on another site which he copied it from.
It seems that lately a lot of false information has been posted on the Internet for our consumption. I have come to believe there are people who are on social networks who are paid to put this type of information out there. A study was taken about the spread false information which was spread on the Internet in 2014 to see what types of information was being spread and ranked it by most posted. Here are the rankings:
1. Rising social tensions in the Middle East and North Africa
2. Widening income disparities
3. Persistent structural unemployment
4. Intensifying cyber threats
5. Inaction on climate change
6. The diminishing confidence in economic policies
7. A lack of values in leadership
8. The expanding middle class in Asia
9. The growing importance of megacities
10. The rapid spread of misinformation online.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying these topics I have listed are misinformation just that when people posted things about these topics much of what they said about the topic was erroneous.
First of all there have been many false statements made about people and this is a real shame. A lot of the people who make them hide behind a screen name and feel they can say anything they want, because their identity is protected. This has done a lot of damage to people’s reputations. Needless to say there are so many political lies posted on the Internet it is hard to know what to believe. I think most of us know there are what I like to refer to as “tons” of Photoshopped photos and videos online. A lot of them are put up as innocent fun, some to show the creator’s prowess in creating hoax videos and some to make it look like someone did something they really didn’t. For example a rash of celebrity photos came out last year in which the faces of famous actresses were pasted on to the nude bodies of women to make people think they were having nude photos taken of themselves. Some of the most common of hoax videos are UFO videos. Many of them show huge craft over buildings and high in the sky over different locations.
What particularly bothers me is when someone posts a photo to prove a point and the photo is not what it is said to be. Most of the time this is an innocent mistake, because the photo was listed as something it was not and it got copied. There is something else which is quite common. It is not about false information being posted, it is about stale info being posted. Many people will copy something to prove a point, but they neglect to look at the date of the article or post they are using to prove their point. I saw one the other day citing something in the field of science as proof this person was correct, but it was stale and a solution to what they were saying wasn’t solved had already come out making them look foolish.
I haven’t even mentioned the schemes on the internet where people are enticed to invest in certain things and are shown statements and figures which are erroneous to try and get people to buy into the scheme. The Internet is a great advancement, but like many advancements it has a dark side and that is it is unpoliced which makes us all potential targets. We have to remember this when we are on the Internet and be sensible about what we say and what information we give out. We may not be able to protect the information being lost by other institutions and by our government, but at the very least we can be careful.
