Why the Internet Spreads so Much Information

The internet is the largest and most accessible repository of information in the history of human civilization. However, its largest issue as a source of information is reliability. The nature of the internet as a collection of many voices means that one must carefully determine the reliability of a source when obtaining information. This is no issue for scholarly work, where most of the information is authored or sponsored by reputable sources whose reliability is universally trusted. However, these sources are not the only ones to create content on the web.

So what's the problem?

One might argue that identifying the reliability of a source on the internet is a trivial matter; it is easy to segregate reliable sources from unreliable ones. For example, a published encyclopedia such as Britannica versus a peer-reviewed encyclopedia such as Wikipedia that anyone can edit. However, the problem lies with the misattribution of memory called source confusion. Source confusion proposes that while a person retains information that they have been exposed to, over time the source of that information either becomes forgotten or attributed to a different source all together. This creates the problem that while you may be able to recognize that a source is unreliable, the information that you obtain will over time no longer be associated with that source which you know to be unreliable.

Each person who spends even a moderate amount of time on social media is exposed to a large amount of opinionated information, whether it’s political views, religious ideologies, or even family values. Most of these claims, if not all, are rarely ever backed up by any evidence. In fact, you probably totally disagree with these claims.

How does this effect me?

One day, you might read some “facts” online on some clickbait site, and immediately dismiss it. You don’t believe Joe Blogger for a second that “smartphones are causing lower attention spans in teens”. After all, he didn’t provide a single source. However, years later, when in a discussion about how technology use has affected teenagers in the past 10 years, you may bring up that exact point in your argument. All you retained was the information, but not that the source was wholly unreliable.

When you think about it, this can have some large implications on society as a whole. You hope that the second-hand information that you spread is reliable, but in reality you can’t always be sure. And this spread of misinformation builds on itself. In the example of the previous discussion, the people who listen to your argument may not take your word for it, but they too may eventually succumb to the same misattribution of memory. Now they too continue to spread this misinformation to others.

So what can we do to stop this? If it is inevitable that we may forget the reliability of the information that we obtain, how can we stop ourselves from repeating this cycle?