Minor, Lee, and Cattacchio

In the first article, Minor describes how he was able to take a 90’s cartoon and make it his own, through the power of the internet.  The blog he was posting on allowed him to create new characters and plots for a cartoon called Street Sharks.  He went so far as to re-writing entire plots of episodes, for his own pass-time.  He was able to create a false identity of the show, simply through the power of the internet.  He proves through his actions that not everything on the internet is credible, much less to be believed as a plotline for a television show.

In the second article, Lee shows how “crowd-sourced” investigations can lead to mistaken leads, some as serious as the Boston Bombings.  After the Boston Bombing, the chase was on to find the culprit, and make the arrest.  There were thousands of hours worth of evidence to analyze and the information was given to the public to find leads.  Many had various theories, and while they were convinced they had found the suspect…it turned out to be incorrect.  This exhibits how the public can spread false info and conspiracies like a wildfire, through the power of social media.

In the third article, Catacchio similarly describes to previous articles that information on social media cannot be trusted.  The article revolves around the shooting of Representative Giffords when holding an event in a Safeway.  Directly after the shooting, social media and reporters who did not vet their sources reported that Representative Giffords had been shot in the head and killed.  It was not until later that it was reported that Giffords was still alive, and then it was confirmed by the hospital treating Giffords.  Twitter allows for anyone to have a voice and simply seeing information on Twitter can persuade people into thinking it is true.  However, in this case the reports were false and provided misleading information to the public.