Accuracy in the Online World

“Consumers of scholarship are very much nurtured by the Internet…They can easily be defrauded by people who are giving false impressions of broad consensus on a point of view, when it’s really just one person.”

- Dr. Lawrence H. Schiffman (Kolowich, 2009)

I’ll admit it: the Internet is my primary source of information; I use it to for everything from researching the history of the world to finding out which toaster oven I should buy. But we don’t know the people providing this information. How do we know that we can trust them? Just like in “real life”, we depend on feedback from others. If 9 out of 10 others agree with the accuracy of what we have found, it must be true, right? But what if 8 of those 9 people are really one person under different aliases? Phantom reviewers and “sock puppets” are a major problem on the Internet, and can skew one’s perception of the accuracy of information provided. Even legitimate sources can be affected by puppets, as one New York University professor found out after an puppet’s comments regarding his work resulted in a formal plagiarism investigation. Unlike “real life” we cannot rely on consensus to verify the accuracy of information. Instead, we must use our own judgment and research to separate fact from fiction.

Kolowich, S. (2009). The Fall of an Academic Cyberbully. Chronicle of Higher Education, 55.

Retrieved September 26, 2009, from Academic Search Premier database

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