Minor, Lee, and Catacchio

Jordan Minor took matters into his own hands on a user-edited wiki site for TV shows when he was in middle school. He conducted an online social experiment where he took the original 40 episode TV series "Street Sharks" and turned it into his own creation of 26 episodes and one TV movie. He created these false renditions of the series using his recollection from his own experiences of the show along with new characters and adventures for them. The site was bought by CBS, and other larger companies failed when they began to take the old-new series as fact without doing any actual fact checking. An easy fix to this problem would just be to know your stuff. Watch the show. Take the typical "don't believe everything you hear on the internet to be true" seriously.
Dave Lee wrote about how crowd-sourced investigations can most often be completely wrong and misinterpreted. After the Boston bombings, frantic citizens wanting to know the quick story flocked to Reddit for their information. This quickly turned into people with theories and opinions creating their own space for these ideas that anyone could post about. These had no actual facts, and people bought into this false information like wildfire. Reddit failed because again, a fact check always needs to be implemented in order for any truth to be put out on the internet. A TV series is slightly more harmless, but especially on issues as weighted as this the internet needs to do a better job of proving its credibility.
In the last article, Catacchio writes about Twitter and how quickly false information can be spread. A news story when viral on Twitter about Representative Giffords being shot and killed when in reality he was alive and supposed to have a full recovery. This was due to the "Top Tweet" system that twitter has created, and Catacchio proposes that this be monitored much closer so that the false information can be taken down.