Minor, Lee, and Catacchio

Jordan Minor talked about TVTome.com which is a user-edited wiki site for tv shows. On the TVTome.com, Minor made up episodes about the show Street Sharks with false summaries of shows and even created fictitious characters for his own version of the show. When CBS bought the website, Minor’s made-up summaries were spread to companies like IMBD and Netflix, so the character lists and summaries for their websites all had false information. I think Minor posted this article just for entertainment, and he really says how to fix how easy it is to post false information online. He does, however, mention that today a lot of his fictitious comments about Street Sharks have been edited or deleted, so now the information online is mostly true. IMBD and Netflix failed bc they didn’t fact check from the website that CBS bought. If they would have just watched or listened they would’ve known that Henry Winkler wasn’t in the cast, and they wouldn’t have posted the false information. Dave Lee talked about how Reddit failed by using the example of false accusations of suspects for the Boston bombing, which was due to public investigation.  Crowd-sourced investigations were very popular after the bombing at the Boston Marathon. That’s because everyone was so curious and worried about what happened, they just wanted the answers to all their questions. A “subreddit” was created that was dedicated to the public sharing their theories and their suspicions for suspects. However, it did more harm than good. Innocent people were falsely accused; it definitely wasn’t a trustworthy site. Someone said, "That's why we have police. We can give them leads and they will figure everything out using facts and clues." Reddit failed because it was open for anyone to state their theories and that caused a lot of chaos. A user named Joseph Stuhr offered a suggestion to fix this issue. "When I make a mistake I can fix it quickly and many users point it out. I feel it lets the readers get involved, and its better to be honest and say 'yeah, I messed up. I was wrong. But I fixed it!'" Chad Catacchio talked about twitter and how the “Top Tweet” feature can cause a lot of confusion. He used an example of when a CNN political director’s tweet had false information, but there was no way to let people know because it was a Top Tweet. Very popular tweets like that are typically assumed to be trustworthy. This confusion could have been avoidable, and Catacchio offers a few solutions to this type of situation. He says it could be fixed by impeding the retweet ability when there are false facts, or have symbol that shows people it’s been proven wrong. He says maybe there could even be a link to the corrected facts and material.