Minor, Lee, and Catacchio Response

The first article was written by Jordan Minor and described his use of TVTome.com, a user-edited wiki for TV shows, to effectively troll many fans of the 1990s cartoon Street Sharks by fabricating more storylines and characters for the show and posting them for public use. The saddest part was how willingly other companies (credible ones like IMDB, Amazon, and Netflix) did not investigate the credibility of the website and simply republished the false information he provided, and it took them a lengthy amount of time to realize their mistakes. The problem stemmed from the fact that nobody bothered to check the credibility of the author or any other sources to verify if the posted information was truly valid.
The second article described how people acted like internet detectives after the Boston bombing in trying to identify suspects. None of them actually correctly identified the proper suspect, and instead singled out innocent people and made their lives more difficult by making them public figures with with a dark cloud about their name. The social media posts made their ways to major news outlets, so the damage was quite widespread as well. While the people behind these actions may have had positive intentions by providing their own judgement on all that transpired, they did major damage to the reputations of those that they incorrectly identified. This could have been prevented or minimized if major news outlets had stuck to real reports by the police and government rather than uninformed interpretations of social media users.
The last article detailed the public response to the attack on Representative Gabby Gifford's life. People were sharing loads of misinformation that wasn't verified for quite some time after the event transpired. The article pointed out one of the issues this can present: misinformation like this can lead to improper crisis response.
All of these articles demonstrated how misinformation can quickly be accepted in society as the truth without any verification, and how that can be truly dangerous. The most important step one can take is to question the truth of a source and be sure that the information is truly trustworthy.