Internet + 24 Hour News Cycle = Vector for Misinformation? · Thursday October 11, 2007

(I wrote the following item for a couple of mailing lists back on June 30th, 2003. It hasn’t quite been the five years I mention, nor has my prediction come true, but I was reminded of it today and thought it was worth sharing more widely anyway. Some no longer relevant links have been removed without modifying the text.)

I hope that all of you realize what a large grain of salt most Internet information should be taken with, but this morning I’ve spotted a rapidly spreading piece of misinformation at a point very close to its origin and thought I’d share it with you.

While the information in question may seem, or be, trivial, the rapidity with which it is spreading is not. The root problem is the incestuous nature of modern reporting, where those doing the reporting become the sources for everyone else. The same mechanism that spreads trivial misinformation can spread the non-trivial.

This morning I saw the news, as I’m sure many of you did, that Katharine Hepburn had died. During the report on CNN Headline News, the newsreader said “She was known as The First Lady of American Cinema.”.

While I would probably argue that such a title was deserved, I’d never heard it used to describe her. My suspicion was that it was a confusing or possibly paraphrasing of the title quite often used to describe Helen Hayes: “The First Lady of American Theatre.”

To make sure I wasn’t falling victim to the brain cell pruning I performed upon myself in college, I decided to do a Google search for the phrase in association with Ms. Hepburn and only found two web references: one in Africa and one in Belgium. You can click here to perform the search and see current results.

This was when I became curious about the news reference and thought I’d check Google News to see if the Headline News copy was the only one. I found eight unique (by Google’s definition) news articles containing the phrase. You can click here to perform this search and see current results.

I expect to see the number of hits for news to climb over the next couple of days and then a slow growth of hits for web sites as the news articles become indexed by search spiders and also begin to be incorporated into biography pages.

My prediction is that if we perform these searches in five years, we will find that there are more biographical web pages about Ms. Hepburn that refer to her as “The First Lady of American Cinema” than not, and that most evidence of this clustering of news references will have disappeared.

Again, I don’t particularly care about the possible misinformation in this case. What I do care about is that, thanks to the Internet and the twenty-four hour news cycle, it’s not simply that “a lie can run around the world before the truth can get its boots on”, but that the truth may be buried in the offspring of the lie before it even knows there’s a race.

(There are 69 hits for that formerly two hit search as I write this, so I guess this meme never hit the tipping point. Snopes is full of ones that did, though. Got a favorite? Post it in the comments.

— Rod Knowlton

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