At the back of our minds we all know that everyone’s opinions are for sale, but it becomes troublesome when those opinions are so prevalent and so spun that it is essentially impossible to find the truth. Today, with the explosion of information available on the Internet just that has happened: everything from the local news to product reviews seems to have been sold off to the highest bidder.
Regulating truth-telling on the Internet is a tricky business that no one has gotten a handle on yet. That difficulty is driven by three major issues. First, the Internet grew out of free societies that value freedom of expression. Second, it is a global format, which cannot be regulated by any single government. Third, misinformation and disinformation on the Internet generate an awful lot of cash, making spin a highly attractive business opportunity.
The Internet grew out of computing experiments in the United States and Europe that allowed multiple machines to work together on a network. Initially designed for high-level functions, the explosion in personal, individual use of the Internet was never really predicted or planned for. In the United States where freedoms of speech and expression are guaranteed by the Constitution, regulation of individual voices on the Internet was anathema to the country’s ethic. As Europeans hooked up and logged on the same ethic, inherited from the US but no less entrenched, extended a free and unregulated Internet across the Western World.
Many nations that do not foster the same attitude toward free speech have put strict controls on what online services are available to their populations, but behind the scenes an information war has been in process throughout the rapid advance of networking technology. Western governments, intent on breaking apart ideological cartels that oppose Western-style democracy, have been hard at work subverting restrictive governments’ controls on the Internet.
The effects of this can be seen in the news, as protestors become increasingly vocal in their resistance of oppressive regimes. More and more, the entrenched resistance groups in those nations have been turning to the Internet, connecting with the people and building their support. Because of its global nature, those governments are powerless to control the information that exists online or people’s ability to access it – and they are willing to employ measures far more severe than any Western power would think of doing openly.
But as information has become increasingly available, its sources have become more numerous, and the facts upon which it is based have become less verified and less verifiable. That has presented an opportunity for a whole variety of groups to influence public opinion by influencing the information that the public consumes. The culprits are varied: special interest groups, ideologues, and companies that want to spin the public’s impression of the product they’re selling.
That’s not to say that there aren’t dedicated truth-tellers out there desperately collecting fact and sharing it with the world. There are diligent scientists and engineers who scrutinize products, for example. There are journalists with high integrity who have left the mainstream to focus on getting the truth out. But for everybody who remains determined to tell the truth, there are ten who would rather take the money.
All of which makes it hard to get to the truth. Doing so requires massive consumption of information in order to ferret out the lies. If you want to know the value of a product, you have to read a batch of product reviews to decipher it; if you want to get inside a political issue, you have to read news and commentary from every angle to see how opinions are skewing the facts.
