Because the Internet said so!

I love the 'net. I love it like a fat kid loves Twinkies. It is a weakness. It is an addiction. It is a fantastically fuckered up home for disinformation. There is so much information clogging up the fiber-optic arteries, that it is hard to filter the legit info from the rest. And social networking is one of the biggest culprits of churning the rumor mill.

All it takes is someone putting a link on their page, especially if it has to do with kids or animals, and it's like someone yelled fire in a theater. People panic. People take sides, people debate how the current economic climate is affecting people's ability to rationalize what color socks they wear in the morning. People hijack debates and lob subject grenades with wild abandon. People get fired up, and angry.

People don't check their facts. People don't think before they post on someones wall. People take things so far out of context that they aren't even playing the same game anymore. For example, there was a picture of a dog that was being restrained by a police officer in a very harsh way. This caused a blow up and people were all up in arms about the cop's action. What the picture didn't show...the dog that was being restrained, had a history of biting people, including it's owner, and was actively attacking the police officer.

Then there was the story of the kid who was shot by his brother. Yep, you guessed it. Just a meme. And right now with all of the country keeping a partial eye on the Occupy Movement, it seems that people are way more trigger happy with their opinions then they were before the whole social networking thingy.

Then we have Wikipedia. The bane of teachers and fact checkers everywhere.  A while ago someone had change the name of a parent of a rather famous person who was in the news recently, and a news reporter had gone with the wrong name.


It must be true. It was on the Internet