Web Hoax and More

This article was more shocking to me than anything else I’ve read in this class thus far. Even though we have begun to talk about misinformation and knowing where your information is coming from, this was still very eye-opening. In class we discussed how Fox owns so many different networks that they can give out slightly slandered information for their benefit without anyone knowing. The only way combat these actions is to gain your information from a variety of sources.
Instead of focusing on the misinformation, this article looks more at how the internet holds many sites that are hoax’s or very misleading. These misleading websites are set up in such a way that they try to pass as sites dedicated to gaining factual information on a subject of interest. One such site that the article looks at is martinlutherking.org. When I first read the site name and saw the .org at the end, I automatically assumed that it was a reliable site for information pertaining to Martin Luther King Jr., but upon a little more research I found out that it was anything but reliable. The .org that goes on the end of many websites such as www.gov.org, which is about the US government, doesn’t necessarily make any of the information true. In fact, this site about Martin Luther King Jr. was made by a group of white nationalists who were trying to preserve their “white western culture.”
Now upon reading further into one such website, the average student could realize that this information might be somewhat biased. Now for a young student who doesn’t know much about the misleading information the internet can provide, this website could have had a large impact on their beliefs. The rest of this article basically goes through more types of web deceits and basically gives the reader a little insight into what bad information is out there on the World Wide Web.
From this article I gained a lot of knowledge as to what you can and can’t always believe. I should never take a website as being completely factual without checking a few others on the same subject. Gaining information from more than one source will provide me with a better overall understanding of the subject at hand. It will also give me a way to kind of check certain websites reliability for future research opportunities.