"The Internet Is a Giant Lie Factory"

[EricBarbour]

Excellent Vice article, recommended. Force your Facebook buddies to read it. Priceless quotes.

Look through your Facebook feed and chances are you’ll find a bunch of half-truths, conspiracies, and chain letter–quality hoaxes sharing space with links to reputable news stories. In the past month, I’ve come across links to an article about Chinese people eating soup made of human fetus (a retread of an old racist rumor), a story about how former Liberian president Charles Taylor was a CIA agent (this one was actually reported by the Boston Globe, but later pretty much completely retracted), and a tale of a lesbian ex-Marine waitress who got stiffed on a tip by a homophobic couple (the couple now claims they gave her an ample tip; it’s not clear who is lying or what is going on).

With the exception of that last story, it would have been pretty easy for the sharers to do a quick Google search and determine that the OMG or WTF item they were about to post was outdated or untrue. The whole point of the internet is that you have pretty much the sum total of human knowledge sitting at your fingertips! It takes TWO SECONDS to research the thing you are thinking about sharing and find out that the Daily Currant is a shitty satire site, or that there is no “Abortionplex,” or that those “legal notices” your friends are posting on Facebook don’t do anything—yet even journalists and others who should know better fall for this crap.

ViralNova explicitly does not give a shit about truth. “We aren’t a news source, we aren’t professional journalists, and we don’t care,” says the site’s about section. The people who share ViralNova’s content don’t care either.

There’s no easy fix to the continual waves of disinformation flooding social media. Facebook could add a “flag as untrue” or “flag as rumor” button next to things posted by users, but that would likely get abused like the old “flag as inappropriate” button was. Bloggers and editors could spend more time verifying their information—but even some books by big-time journalists aren’t properly fact-checked, so it’s a little too much to ask StrugglingWebsite.org to make sure everything it runs is 100 percent accurate. We all have to get a little more skeptical about the links we come across on a day-to-day basis, which means assuming everything is a lie unless it’s confirmed by multiple reputable sources. When something seems so outrageous and surprising that it couldn’t be real, it’s probably not.

[Johnny Au]

I would not be surprised if there is a news article about an artifact found from the rubble that was the result of the Bicholim Conflict.

[enwikibadscience]

Excellent Vice article,

ViralNova explicitly does not give a shit about truth. “We aren’t a news source, we aren’t professional journalists, and we don’t care,” says the site’s about section. The people who share ViralNova’s content don’t care either.

Neither does en.Wikipedia, and this is the biggest defense of my dead horse, that it's sourced. That you can't read the sources seems not to be an issue. Niether does the fact that your source disagrees with another of yours appear to be an issue.

En.Wikipedia doesn't give a shit about the truth.