Reading Assignment #5

Kathryn Smith
Thursday, November 13, 2008

“Web Hoaxes, Counterfeit Sites, and Other Spurious Information on the Internet”

After reading this article, “Web Hoaxes, Counterfeit Sites, and other Spurious Information on the Internet,” I was shocked to realize how much misleading information is on the web, yet also shocked to find that many people in the media such as Fox News, ESPN.com, and even Wall Street journal online, fall in the trip of misinformation provided out there.

Although the topic about the live deer and a vest was a harmless distortion of information, it amazing me how quickly and easily people, such as news professionals, can fall under the trap of believing false information. If not even these professional news reporters fail to use critical evaluation of information provided, I cant begin to imagine how easily everyday people are probably fooled when searching for facts, and are unable to differentiate fact from fiction.

However, many web sites are easily pointed out as a hoax, some are not so easy to tell whether the information provided is false or not. This is way it is so important for people to search for an articles creditability and reliability when searching information on the web. To try and hinder these hoaxes, websites have began to detect and track for Internet Hoaxes to help regulate what kinds of information is provided to the public and how one can differentiate false from the truth.

Today, you can surf to web and find countless amounts of information provided about basically any topic, but when looking for creditable information it is important that we are aware of these “Hoax Web Sites” and continue to examine how reliable the bits of information we find is, and remember to search numerous sites with facts to back up the creditability of whatever fact or information on a topic one may be researching. I

t’s great to see the Internet rises to new and better things, and providing more and more information to the public, but also it’s important to remember with more information, there may be more and more chances of many of the facts we retrieve to be false, so always double check where you may be getting information from.