Is it harder to gain knowledge on the internet?

The internet plays a significant role in making information more accessible, but it has also increased the spread of misinformation, making it more difficult to gain knowledge on the internet.

Although the US has laws against spreading misinformation, it is only enforced in unusual circumstances – such as when a diseased/injured US soldier is involved while the US is in an armed conflict. This is because of conflicts with the First Amendment; And since there is no one to hold them accountable, those who spread false information will have no problems behaving unethically. They go on the internet and post information that is out of context or completely fabricated which is where the problem starts but it is even more impactful when entire companies or representatives deliberately spread false information to win people over. Stephen Kuebler and Jonathan Beever (2019) explain that “Some bits of misinformation are laughable – such as the idea that the Earth is flat. Others are dangerous – such as the false claims that vaccines cause autism or that the Sandy Hook shootings never occurred” (p. 7). This is important as vaccines are made to cure but when there are people claiming that it causes harm, those who believe such things will avoid vaccines and that only brings them harm. One way to prevent this would be to have social media companies regulate the validity of information on their sites more since most of the time, that is where false information originates and spreads. Without regulations from social media companies or the government, it only gets harder to differentiate what is true and what is not on the internet. In March 2017, Equifax, one of the 3 major bureaus, had a data breach that affected 143 million of its users and failed to send them any notice of their information being compromised. “The breach itself was bad enough, but the company deliberately misled customers and withheld information. It also later came out that additional data breaches occurred, but customers were not informed.” (“Biggest Business Lies Ever Told,” 2023). From a Deontologist perspective, Equifax did not follow their duty to be truthful to their customers. If the hackers were to use that data fully, a lot more damage could have been done, which in turn could have been avoided if the customers knew that they were compromised so they could freeze their accounts or take whatever action was necessary for them to be safer from the attack. While it is important not to cause public panic, it is just as important for customers to be able to take precautions and be informed of such cases in a timely manner. The withholding of information is one of the biggest contributions of why it is getting more difficult to gain knowledge on the internet.

In 2014, Elizabeth Holmes founded a company (Theranos) that was valued at $9 billion by inventing new methods that would revolutionize blood testing and would only need tiny amounts of blood. “With a few drops of blood, Theranos promised that its Edison test could detect conditions such as cancer and diabetes quickly without the hassle of needles” (“Theranos scandal,” 2022). This was not true, and Elizabeth knew that such technology did not work but still claimed that it did as to get more investors. Within a year, Elizabeth and Theranos were exposed, and the company crashed. She was charged with 4 counts of fraud and found not guilty on 4 other charges, none of which she pleaded guilty. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison and, as of now, has approximately 9 years remaining. Elizabeth dropped out of Standford University to pursue her dreams, which played a role in why many people may have believed her. Adding her persusive skills, it is clear how she was able to manipulate the public and feed them misinformation. This shows that we put too much trust in certain figures and do not actively seek evidence to confirm what they say until it is too late. In this case, people already spent their money and will likely be very wary of services like that, which makes it harder to know which companies in that domain are trustworthy and which are not.

Misinformation is an issue, but it is not all the internet has to offer. The internet contains valuable and key information that we are now able to access in ways that we never could before. There is information easily accessible about our history available to whoever wants to learn it. There are now endless opportunities for education thanks to our access to reliable resources on the internet. This helps a lot of people stay safer and be more secure online by not having to visit unsafe sources. Many websites are tailored for scholars and are heavily tested and reviewed for information to make sure that everything on there is reliable. Big companies such as Google and Microsoft have their own academic search engines that can be used to search scholar articles. Scholar articles are typically peer-reviewed which only makes learning on the internet easier. Live fact checkers – such as ClaimBuster – are now available which “use natural language processing tools and supervised learning (based on a human-coded dataset) to identify factual and false information” (RAND Corporation, 2019). Combining all of these gives us powerful tools that can be used to discard unreliable information and learn from the best sources available. More than ever before, people are getting more and higher education and are adapting to what the internet is all about. Parents are also informing their kids to be skeptical of what they see online and that means more people are growing up already knowing not to believe everything they see on the internet.

It is certainly true that more people are getting educated and are learning about the dangers of misinformation. More tools are available to check whether information is true or not, but how many people realistically use them? 2017 research has shown that only a small percentage of people use fact checkers. Eileen Brown (2017) writes that “[Zignal Labs] discovered that 86 percent of Americans who read news articles on social media do not always fact-check the information they read. In fact, 61 percent who read articles on social media sites are likely to like, share, or comment on content shared by a friend” (p. 15). Many people believe that they can fact check themselves and do not need to use external tools. While this is true for experts in their fields, it can get complicated when studying complex subjects for the normal person. Most of the people that write mis/disinformation try their best to make it seem like it was written by an expert. When statistics are involved, numbers can be manipulated to work against what they were made to represent. All these tools only help those who are willing to use them and even then, some level of precaution should be taken. Google scholar indexes Academic articles but it does not filter misinformation meaning some of the articles will be unreliable or can contain outdated information. Aside from company and government regulations, I believe it is equally important for someone to have self-regulation when trying to learn anything from the internet.