Accuracy of online information

Howard Rheingold says “schoolchildren are not taught how to distinguish accurate information from inaccurate information online”.

Rheingold presents an important point which many know about yet not much is done to change it. The difficulty of filtering information found online and understanding the spread of inaccurate information is essential in school related work, news about natural disasters, deaths, healthy information, and political situations. Even though the “democratization of content” as many people have called the possibility for anyone to easily create and publish to a wide audience is a wonderful thing, the loss of the process of editing information before publishing it has created a new danger.

Whether it is a student doing research for homework or a project, a journalist/news company looking on social media to find updates about weather conditions/natural disasters or people wanting to find information about political situations (such as the conditions of Syrians living in Syria and outside of Syria, the situation in Egypt during the 2011 revolution, the Black lives matter movement, etc.) wrong information can have major consequences. It is important to make sure that a source is a trusted one.

Rheingold continues to say “ surely there are ways to design web-browsers to help with this task and ways to teach young people how to use the powerful online tools available to them”. In one of his articles, he calls the crucial skill of sorting information “crap detection”. In a time where the truth is not always clear, we need to learn ways for analyzing the information we see online to assess its validity because part of learning new information is making sure it is true. This brings up the vital question: should this skill be taught in school as part of the curriculum? To what extent is it the job of teachers to give their students these tools? Parents? The students themselves? If web-browsers were designed to “help with this task”, what’s to say these will not turn into browsers like google chrome, safari, and firefox, where there exists inaccurate information?