If you're old enough to remember the early days of the World Wide Web, you probably remember that you could log on to the internet and find practically anything - claims of fact that were true, false, questionable, or just plain crazy.
And YOU UNDERSTOOD THAT IT WAS YOUR JOB to figure out which facts were true, or credible, and which ones weren't. You didn't expect the internet to make that decision for you.
"All of us are smarter than any of us." That's what the internet pioneers at least claimed to believe in the early days: information could be shared, discussed, debated, and challenged. Knowledge was seen as distributed, not concentrated.
Now, it seems, "misinformation" is suddenly a problem on the internet. It's almost as if, at some point in the recent past, certain powerful interests felt themselves threatened by too much free inquiry. Something had to be done.
So, when was that inflection point?
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| Google Trends search on term "misinformation" 2004 - present. |
So if you thought you were suddenly hearing a lot more people complaining about "misinformation" on the internet, it's not your imagination.
