Web of Deception: Misinformation on the Internet

Citation

Calvert, P. (2002), "Web of Deception: Misinformation on the Internet", The Electronic Library, Vol. 20 No. 6, pp. 521-521. https://doi.org/10.1108/el.2002.20.6.521.7

Misinformation has been in the news quite a lot in recent years, as government deception, corporate scandals, and shady professional practices have all come to light. Throw in the usual suspects, such as snake oil salesmen masquerading as practitioners of holistic medicines, and there is enough interest for a good book on the subject. Mintz has put together several authorities on the topic of misinformation propagated through the World Wide Web, a topic that is of enormous concern to information managers who have to wrestle with selection of useful electronic resources for our clients. There are no gatekeepers on the Web to filter the information, so anybody and anything can get out there. The last thing we need is bogus information, but that’s exactly what we get from some Web sites. This book, though, isn’t aimed exclusively at information managers, as the content is aimed and the book priced for the interested layperson.

The first chapter on “Web hoaxes, counterfeit sites, and other spurious information on the Internet” by Paul Piper sets the tone. It’s an attempt to classify the different sorts of misinformation that are encountered in Web sites:

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  the counterfeit sites that pretend to be something they are not;

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  “suspicious” sites that contain dubious information that is hard to verify;

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  bogus news sites;

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  disinformation (often from official agencies);

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  subject‐specific misinformation from medical and business sites;

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  fictitious sites;

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  parodies and spoofs;

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  entertainment;

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  news groups; and

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  hacks.

Some of these are hardly troublesome, for if Web users are fooled by the Mankato site then they will be fooled by absolutely anything. It is the deliberately malicious and the half‐truth sites that are the real danger. Yet it is very hard to write about this topic, for the truly malicious misinformers are hardly likely to make their actions apparent because that would remove the purpose of their actions, which is precisely to misinform. The authors in this book have no problem pointing to spoofs, for the authors of those sites want us to appreciate their humour and cleverness. But how can you tell if that site about the Holocaust you just visited was on the level? A misinformer is not going to tell you they are lying.

The problem with misinformation is just how we can say, with any confidence, that this piece of information is true and that one false. We have long since moved on from the mediaeval certainty that there was a single unified truth “out there” if only we could find it. The slow but steady acceptance that there are variations of the truth has led inevitably to the post‐modern view that we each construct our own reality, and in so doing we create our own “truth”. This has made it impossible to say there is any guaranteed means of telling fact from fiction. What I wanted to see more of in this book was some connection between the apparent lies told on these Web sites and how, collectively and individually, we judge the truth. Of course we don’t make such judgements each and every time we find information on the Web. You have to trust somebody sometime so we are prepared to suspend judgement when we visit certain sites. When do we stop our natural willingness to believe and adopt a more suspicious attitude? That’s what I really wanted to read about in this book. Nobody will have a clear‐cut answer to this question, simply because “truth” is (at least at the present time) such a difficult construct. I finished reading this book having enjoyed the experience, but not feeling a whole lot wiser about misinformation. Useful for general collections, and not a bad recommendation for LIS reading lists.