Where its great success is that it can offer a voice to anyone on a worldwide platform, it is also its greatest weakness in that any amount of misinformation can be spread so quickly by anyone that it quickly becomes regarded as fact. A perfect example of this phenomenon is former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy and her rabid insistence that vaccinations caused her son’s autism.
McCarthy’s claims spread like wildfire via social media and her story was shared millions upon millions of times – despite its questionable authenticity. Today, we have an epidemic of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children because they think there is a link between vaccines and autism – because a woman whose greatest claim to fame was taking of her clothes in a men’s magazine said so.
Lest you think I’m picking on poor Miss McCarthy, take a look at the popularity of conspiracy theories on the internet about everything under the sun – including the shooting that occurred in this city last summer. The sheer number of people who are trying to qualify every tragedy as a government staged hoax is mind numbing, but their videos and essays garner thousands of hits from like-minded individuals who just continue to spread ignorance. The more hits they get, the higher they’re ranked; sensationalism sells on the World Wide Web!
Since the rise of the internet, everyone is a self-professed expert on something and everyone has a ‘qualified’ opinion on just about everything – whether it’s fracking, GMOs, climate change, religion, nutrition, parenting, or one of a million other topics. The sheer amount of misinformation that gets shared on a daily basis just on my social media feeds alone leaves me dizzy sometimes. Despite all the information in the world at our fingertips, people seem to gravitate to one or two columns on a subject they read off some obscure website and take it as the gospel because it resonates with an opinion they probably already have.
The Google search engine – the most popular in the world – currently ranks its pages by the amount of incoming links that are directed to them. Basically, the more people who are accessing a page (for whatever reason), the more popular it becomes and the higher it appears on a search result. A perfect example is the Jenny McCarthy anti-vaccination situation. Because the story was shared so often through so many channels, the websites that carried McCarthy’s claims became more and more popular and rose up the search engine ranks until they would be among the first results that would appear when someone searched for vaccination information on Google. Even though McCarthy’s claims proved to be false, there is a large anti-vaccination movement now built on a lie because of the belief that “if it’s all over the internet, it must be true”.
Thankfully, this paradigm may be about to change.
A Google research team is experimenting with a model that will rank pages based on the number of verifiable facts they contain as opposed to their popularity. The more false or unverifiable facts a page contains on a subject, the lower its KBT (Knowledge Based Trust) score will be and the lower search ranking it will receive. How will it verify these facts? Through a massive data warehouse known as the Knowledge Vault – which Google has been working on for several years that is akin to the greatest encyclopedia set ever created; but is updated constantly by a computer algorithm that constantly combs the internet for verified and universally agreed upon facts.
We’re talking real Matrix stuff here, folks.
Of course there’s a segment of the population that is upset about this because “the truth is out there, man!’ and they’re convinced that shady forces are trying to keep us in the dark. They’re worried that alternate views will be squashed and everyone will be assimilated into thinking the same way and drinking the New World Order Kool-Aid. That’s the great thing, though – the alternate views won’t be removed from the internet. You can argue facts all you want and publish whatever you wish on the internet, but you’re no longer going to be provided a spotlight at center stage to do it if you’re claims are most likely a load of horse feathers.
In terms of real world application, it’d be like this - you won’t get a podium in front of City Hall anymore for your foolishness. You’ll be relegated to the far end of the parking lot at the Moncton Coliseum at 3 a.m. on a Thursday . If people want to listen to what you have to say, they certainly can go find you. It’s just that fewer people will stumble across your ranting on their way down Main Street to buy a coffee. (Not that everything that comes out of City Hall makes sense, but you get the idea).
With the shape the world is in right now, one of the few things that might get us out of this mess is knowledge. Hard facts that people can agree with and work with together to improve our way of life are exactly what we need – not people wasting their time trying to separate the wheat from the chaff as far as what is sound information, especially when undisputable facts on many topics are already out there.
The internet can be used for more than pictures of cats and posting what you had for breakfast on Facebook. Knowledge is power and it’s high time we started harnessing the knowledge of the internet for everything it’s worth. Kudos to Google for taking that first step.
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