An analysis of Authenticity in Online Content
Speaker: Hecaitou 和菜头
I really like the web. This year, a lot of weird things happened to me on the web, I realized the web today is no longer what it was originally. I like to use the web to search for information, to find critiques of products, films, books, or to find news and analysis.
I recently bought a book. I chose this book because I saw the positive feedback about the book on douban.com and also from rss feeds from blogs discussing this book. So I was really disappointed when I actually read the book and it was crap.
I realized that the information I received from the web about the book was just like soft ads.
This is one of the biggest changes on the internet this year: businesses realized the low-cost and high-efficiency of marketing on the web. Information I get from the web is no longer raw feedback from actual users and consumers, but rather a lot of information has been polluted by profit-seekers
Seeking “true information” on the internet:
I read about an incident – 6 police officers killed 1 university student. I reacted strongly to the news, I was angry to find out about it and felt it was really wrong of the police.
More information about the student began to appear on the web. I found out that he wasn’t a university student, but rather he had graduated from university two years ago. Later, I found out that he wasn’t really a graduate at all.
Twenty-four hours later, Heilongjiang news station reported that the student had attacked police officers on three three different occasions previously.
Another twenty-four hours later, youtube video appeared giving names to faces, then netizens posted more details of the people involved, more background of students, mostly negative.
Eventually, my impression of the event completely flipped, before sympathy for student, now police are heroes.
Who put the video on youtube? Its not on tudou.com. There were 40,000 views overnight.
Web is powerful, everyone wants to control it.
Information you receive on the web, may not be “truth”. It is what a certain party wants you to see, it has been filtered.
How can we screen fake information given by profit-seekers and from government?
I don’t have very good remedies.
I keep rss feeds from people, pages, blogs that I trust. I take all other information with a heavy grain of salt.
Personalize my search engine.
Also, to look at the time line of information coming in to see where and when information originated from.
Finally, you have to be willing to spend time to look for information that is “true”.
