Essay Prompt Draft 4

With the commercialisation of the internet, the freedom of information on the internet has led to an overwhelming catalogue of information online, from personal opinion to academic papers. However, having few regulations in cyberspace has resulted in an increasing spread of misinformation and disinformation, some with motives to humour, and others with malicious intent. Regardless of the intent, many people often get fooled by the false content online created by satirical websites. This problem is further exacerbated when the disinformation presented is something which the public wants to believe. Action needs to be taken such that one can accurately judge the content online. Therefore, Google should implement an online content rating system to caution users of the websites that they are visiting, so that they can be warned of what others had to say about that particular website.

Satirical websites result in many misleading articles and social media posts, fooling many into believing such information is true and factual when in fact much is completely made up. Very often such websites indicate in fine print or do not indicate at all that they post satirical articles, contributing to the deception. One example of how such “news” has fooled many would be the article by National Report on how a 15 year old in Los Angeles who “swatted” another gamer was convicted of domestic terrorism and sentenced to 25 years imprisonment (Cruz, 2014). Upon the release of the article, it was widely circulated by many online news websites and social media, many of whom reported it as authentic. According to Barker (2014), the article was shared 200, 000 times on Facebook, and received many comments applauding the decision of the judge. Barkers’ opinion was that the article was more than convincing to deceive the average reader, and would have fooled everyone except for the fact that National Report was the only paper which covered the trial, and this ultimately led to the hoax being unveiled. Scams like these are common. According to Wikipedia, media outlets have reported National Report’s satire as fact 13 times since the creation of the National Report website in 2013. Such satirical news articles are hard for the readers and even media outlets to guard against, given the authentic appearance of the articles.

The current solution put forward by the Singapore government to tackle this problem is the regulation of news websites. News websites, satirical or not, have perceived reliability due to the term “news” being used, and thus clamping down on websites that claim to be news but are instead downright misleading is a good approach. In this approach, the government takes the role of deciding if the website reports news which actually took place, and if necessary, takes action to remove misleading websites. This is, however, a limited approach. It takes time to implement and identify errant websites, and is only applicable to Singaporean news websites.

A better solution would be for Google to implement an online content rating system which relies on public feedback to better warn users of the content that they are reading. After an online user has visited a website or read some news on social media, that person can choose to write a user review on their web browser which would then pick the majority review response and display it for other users who are visiting the website or reading the news. This method relies on user feedback, and thus a vast number of websites can be moderated. This is especially useful since websites with heavy traffic will receive more feedback from a wider range of people, enhancing the credibility. Examples of tags that websites could have by the Google browser could take the form of “this website is known for satirical content” or “this website has been flagged for extreme views”.  Had National Report been flagged as a satirical website, many people would have not been fooled so easily by the article and such a spectacle could have been avoided easily.

While the internet has stayed relatively free from regulations since its inception, implementation of an internet content rating system by web browsers are long overdue. In the implementation of such a system, care has to be made that user’s privacy details are not unnecessarily revealed, or websites could be manipulated and abused to show false ratings. In the end, the onus is on the users to verify if the content they are viewing comes from reliable sources. There is only so many measures that the Singapore government and organisations such as Google can do to prevent the spreading of false information. Ultimately, some discretion is needed before one shares “news” over social media.