One day soon, "I saw it on the web" and "someone sent me an email" will overtake "a bloke in the pub told me" as the catch-all verification that separates urban myth, Nazi propaganda, and good old-fashioned lunacy from truth.
While conspiracy theories are as old as the hills, the internet's ability to connect believers and create communities of shared interests is blurring the already-weak line between fact, factoid and subjective interpretation. Tell schoolchildren to go surf the web to help with their history homework and they are likely to come up with a site presenting "evidence" that a cabal of 666 rabbis rules the world from a secret hideout in northern California.
And it is not just the young and na¿ve who are vulnerable. If you think you are too smart to be taken in by web spoofing, then take a peek at this site:
www.cnn.com&business_story=breaking_news&urgent@www.itstrue.eu.com. Most people would assume that by clicking on this link, they would be connected to CNN.
Not so. Instead, they find themselves at a plausible but entirely bogus news site. The trick works because most people do not understand URL syntax. The "cnn.com" to the left of the "@" is interpreted as a user name for the (bogus) site to the right of it. This simple redirection trick is good enough to fool almost all web surfers, and there are some even better tricks available to the determined hoaxer who is prepared to learn some Javascript and so on.
What this demonstrates is that it is frighteningly easy to fool people into believing bogus news and current affairs stories. It is worth noting, however, that the net's ability to propagate patent untruths is a novel contribution to the human condition.
Until we have a workable digital identity infrastructure, it will remain ridiculously easy to fabricate legitimacy on the internet. "Ah," you might say, "but how many people can a bogus site attract?" The truth is, it is entirely possible for one person working from home with a computer and a modem to create a website that appears just as credible as those created by businesses, universities, agencies and governments.
On the night of the top-rated CBS Survivor show's finale last year, the CBS website, with all the resources of a major TV network behind it, attracted 245,000 unique visitors.
On the same night, www.survivorsucks.com, run by a Paul Sims, based in Dallas, Texas, drew 100,000 visitors. This is just the beginning. Once broadband becomes widespread, individuals will be setting up their own TV channels.
Who will care about the News at Ten, or the BBC's analysis when half the population is watching Dave's Nude News at Eleven or the Idaho Survivalist's News Corner? Who is to say that my mate down the pub knows less than a BBC reporter about what is going on in a particular hospital, company or government department: my mate down the pub might actually work there. Who is to know?
One response might be to teach people to put their trust in respected individuals. Nice idea, but again, identities are very difficult to verify on the internet. The FBI now calls identity theft the fastest growing white-collar crime in history. Here is a recent example: a few weeks ago in California, the police accused Michael Morse, 27, of sneaking into the office of a health club where he was a member and stealing the identities of a dozen or so people who were also members, which he then used to trade on eBay.
All you need is someone's name and address and you can start running up bills in their name: trouble that costs considerable time and effort to repair. More to the point, you can easily assume their identity online and have no end of mischief. One result of all this ought to be a shift in educational emphasis toward the evaluation of sources rather than depending on their labels.
What is the point of teaching children facts when they can find them almost instantaneously on the web? If they want to know who succeeded Henry II, they can find that out in a couple of seconds. When they do a search on "treatment for liver cancer" on the internet, how do they begin to evaluate what comes back? The real challenge is not finding out facts, but figuring out what is a fact! But before the letters page is overrun by philosophers vying to answer that question, I have a few others to pose. How do you know that I am really Dave Birch?
Or that I work for Consult Hyperion? If someone were to discover that I am actually an avatar, a computer-simulated creation, would that make my column any less interesting? After all, you can't believe everything you read in the newspapers.
