Minor comments on the seemingly trustworthy review sites for TV and movies such as IMDB. People go to these website looking for basic information on about the shows, not realizing that someone might take the time to fool them. It seems somewhat trivial but as an experiment, Minor wanted to see how many people could be tricked into believing blatant lies. It turns out that people are very susceptible to fake characters and other made-up aspects. This suggests that "accredited" sites should have a more intense screening process for the people writing up information or for the information being copied onto the site.
Lee explains how the general public has the tendency to take serious and large-scale matters into their own hands. Investigations, a duty that is supposed to be left to police and detectives, are carried out by people who have no knowledge on the matters. This leads to extremely faulty posts on the internet about possible suspects and details of the crimes. Mainstream media runs with the fake leads and ends up reporting the wrong information, therefore propagating the cycle. Media outlets should not report news about life-fearing events until they have accurate information coming from a professional and reliable source.
Catacchio emphasizes how social media, Twitter specifically, can be an extremely helpful but in some cases, extremely misleading source. In the aftermath of a shooting, there was a lot of confusion regarding the condition of the victim. Twitter's design allowed an inaccurate tweet to continue its reign at the top of the trending tweets, even after it was obvious that it was wrong. While it's important that certain tweets are made more prominent so that information is spread faster, sometimes it's more important that only the accurate information is presented. Catacchio suggests a different algorithm that would prevent further spread of inaccurate tweets or provide a link to a correction.
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