One of the things that drive people nuts is that others will find absolute certainty in “facts” because the internet said so. It manifests in a variety of ways, from the media perpetuating a myth (such as the “sharpened screwdriver in the Bernie Goetz case) to facially credible blogs proffering bizarre interpretations of the law.
From XKCD, a great cartoon that explains one way in which utter nonsense is transformed into internet reality.
Your kids use Wikipedia for their papers and reports. You use Wikipedia as a quick and dirty source. I use it too. It’s not always wrong, but it’s not always right either.
The question is how many people either find validation for their mistakes on the internet, or innocently think they’ve learned some “true fact” because it says so somewhere on the internet? This is what we have to contend with going forward, the digital version of a trusting nation that believes everything that appears in writing, no matter how wrong or ridiculous. Don’t even think about the impact photoshop has on this problem, right Benneton?
H/T Steve Magas
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That big no name gubmint agency in formerly charge of gathering info overseas has long used a similar process to justify all manner of mischief by planting stories with very happily willing “journalists” in the foreign press, then bringing it home through its domestic useful press idiots. Roald Dahl did the same for Winnie Churchill here in D.C. during WWII.
Malicious disinformation presents an entirely different, and far more difficult, problem. That upstanding journalists are happy to be a part of the machine, for a “greater purpose,” may be hard to overcome.
I laughed out loud when my 12 year old daughter told me that Abraham Lincoln once said that you can’t believe what you read on the internet! (though I think she got that quote from one of her teachers….)
Perhaps it belabors the obvious, but disinformation is hardly proprietary to any US governmental agency.
Concern about it can readily be dated back to WWI days when the Zimmerman Telegram–to cite just one example–was thought by many to be the creation of the British gov’t, designed to pull the US into the war.
Disinformation continues its not-so-merry way, leading to deaths and pandemonium. “AIDS created by US military”; “Rich Americans buying and then killing foreign kids to harvest their organs”; “OMG, depleted uranium!!”
“Useful idiots” is only a translation of the Russian. The NKVD and KGB were masters of disinformation. Whether their successor is still at it is most likely.