31–40 of 118 posts
If Obama used the fake fact in a speech of his, would you blame his researchers or the guy who originally made up the lie?
I think the point is that authorities on information have a responsibility to ensure the information is accurate.
News sources these days are so programmed to chase every story that there's no room for fact checking and they all look like incredible idiots. It's amazing to me that anyone takes Old Media seriously anymore.
I can't help but read this like: Let me show you how dangerous sidewalks are by telling you the story about the time I went for a walk while swinging a spiked bat at every passer by. It was great fun, but it demonstrates why sidewalks are dangerous.
No. It's more like he was swinging a foam bat and is warning us how easy it would be for someone more malicious to swing a spiked bat. Seriously, I don't really care if some teenager creates a non-sense fanfic world on poorly monitored sites. However, it is noteworthy how the utter lack of quality control on so many Internet properties can propagate falsehoods. This undermines the claim that the Internet was supposed…
It's not a "lack of quality control". It's that the internet is data-starved. I'm familiar with how much data is recorded each year, and it seems paradoxical that we could still be data-starved, but it is so.
Starving people/organizations ignore all the warning signs. They're desperate for what it is that they seek. The people looking for this bit of nostalgia want to be able to find information on it. Synopses, screenshots, and even videos. For these people, there aren't any substitutes. And the internet just doesn't have much on it (not like some Encyclopedia Britannica editor will have spent 18 months tracking down real information on this show).
Adding more quality control won't fix this, as the root cause wasn't lack of quality control. Attempting to do so will backfire, those people desperate for this will merely go out and create their own websites to hunt down the dreck that doesn't pass QC, and once they host it on a blog or whatever it will leak back into the higher quality sites (like has happened on IMDB in this article).
I can't help but read this like: Let me show you how dangerous sidewalks are by telling you the story about the time I went for a walk while swinging a spiked bat at every passer by. It was great fun, but it demonstrates why sidewalks are dangerous.
No. It's more like he was swinging a foam bat and is warning us how easy it would be for someone more malicious to swing a spiked bat. Seriously, I don't really care if some teenager creates a non-sense fanfic world on poorly monitored sites. However, it is noteworthy how the utter lack of quality control on so many Internet properties can propagate falsehoods. This undermines the claim that the Internet was supposed…
For those blaming the guy, and not the system / sites. If Obama used the fake fact in a speech of his, would you blame his researchers or the guy who originally made up the lie? I think the point is that authorities on information have a responsibility to ensure the information is accurate.
I can't help but read this like: Let me show you how dangerous sidewalks are by telling you the story about the time I went for a walk while swinging a spiked bat at every passer by. It was great fun, but it demonstrates why sidewalks are dangerous.
I don't think "be wary of lies on the Internet" was the message, more "I did a funny thing and the Internet is dumb sometimes" - I was in tears laughing at some of the stupid episode summaries. And the irony that free-for-all Wikipedia was the only accurate source was pretty good too
The other places just copied the information from whatever source they had available, which happened to be from tvtome.com.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many articles have had the premise "You can't trust wikipedia, because it's full of lies! Why, just look at this handful of lies I've put on there!"
But that's not what this is, really. It points out the greater danger of the propagation of those lies. It's entirely reasonable to assume others might similarly lie and this article demonstrates how such lies can propagate through the internet in certain cases.
None of this is the author's fault. The initial lie was meant as harmless fun, the fact that so many (largely highly regarded) media properties went and spewed it out as fact later on is the real problem. I mean how many times a week do we hear about Old Big Media retweeting nonsense or publishing Onion articles? News sources these days are so programmed to chase every story that there's no room for fact checking and…
I think Rox->Roxie is a pretty plausible confusion even without "malicious" interference, so I'm not sure those parts prove anything.
Edit: to be fair, I'm trusting the author's current account, I never watched Street Sharks myself. I could be the victim of some epic meta trolling.