reading number 5

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

Mikayla Chairello
Reading Report 5
11/17/2008

This article brings up very interesting information about the internet that people often either choose to overlook most of the time or simply don’t know or realize. Although the internet is full of uselful, high quality information, it also is riddled with sites that contain misinformation, or opiniated information or even counterfeit websites. Sometimes this misonformation comes from simple honest mistakes of typos or accidentally leaving out information, but other times, webasites can be intenionally misleading and that’s where it gets scary. There are ma y different types of these ‘false’ websites. They can range fron political, fun , to just misleading advertisements. One of the most interesting examples in the reading was the website martinlutherking.org. From its title it obviously sounds like it would be truthfuil information about Martin Luther King jr. that supported his cause and would correctly portay him and information about him. But in actuality this website was made by a White Supremecist group. Another thing that would trick most naïve people is that this website looks pretty legitamte. And people don’t realize that it is extremeley misleading for that reason. I think it is a really scary idea that people don’t look further into the information that they encounter while surfing the internet. Most people will read and use the first information they come across because it’s the easiest and quickest way, without questiong its aunthenticity or legitamacy. If we don’t start education our students on how to identify high quality information from some of the garbage out there, we will begin to see some highly misonformed people who believe extremely false or misleading information. We definitely don’t want this kind of information to spread.