Reading Report #1

“Web Hoaxes, Counterfeit Sites, and Other Spurious Information on the Internet” By Paul S. Piper

The article “Web Hoaxes, Counterfeit Sites, and Other Spurious Information on the Internet” discusses misleading websites and information. Some of the information on websites may seem like it is false, but really the sites are just a matter of opinion. The internet can be a great tool but it can also be very misleading and this article discusses how. There are a lot of websites that seem very informative and real, when in reality anyone can post information to these sites. An example from the article of how the internet is misleading is a counterfeit site. This is a site that poses as a legitimate site that gives out misleading information. The author identifies several specific counterfeit sites about Dr. Martin Luther King, the White House, the Makah tribe and the World Trade Organization. Another example is a suspicious website. This is a website that gives misleading information about academic discourse. It will say certain events were proven not to have happened. The author discusses the meaning of disinformation as deliberately giving false information. People can make websites and ask for money for a specific organization or for a tragedy that has occurred and a lot of these sites are false. They will ask for money for victims and their families if something tragic has happened like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina. Throughout the article, the author gives things to look for on sites to prove if they are real or not including the domain, footnotes and contact information. Also, towards the end the author provides readers with websites used to track false and misleading internet sites.

Overall, I found this article to be very interesting. It provided me with a lot of useful information about misleading information on the internet. It also gave me sites to use to track false websites which is a very handy tool especially when conducting research or when working on a project for school or work. I always knew that some websites were false but I never knew that there were so many different types and that some were so easy to miss. It is hard to believe that people will waste their time making these false sites and providing people with false information but it is a cruel world and a lot of times people just simply do not care. It is good to know the information I gathered from this article not only for myself, but so I can share it with other people as well. I know so many people who will go on a site, read something, tell someone about it and come to find out in the end it was all false. The internet is very tricky and people need to know how to properly use it and need to know when and how to identify a false, misleading website.