Internet: Information or Misinformation?

December 20, 2022
Camila Vainer

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Class of 2025

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Today, 5.5 billion searches are made on the Internet every day. We managed to access the information with just one click, managing to obtain information in just a few seconds. But in turn, this facilitates editing and/or the ease of uploading information. So, does the advent of the internet help us to inform ourselves or has it simply become a medium that makes it difficult to find what we are looking for?

The Internet was created with the purpose of accelerating information searches. Then it was left in the hands of the users, who managed to "corrupt" it, distorting the information and managing to misinform consumers and thus failing to fulfill the purpose of the original product. A blog called Satista commented in one of its articles “The fight against disinformation and manipulation continues to gain value, as the world increasingly suffers the effects of disinformation campaigns. This has been made evident in recent weeks with the war between Russia and Ukraine, which has generated endless false posts taken for granted and replicated on social networks and even in the media.”

Therefore, the large internet platforms are not going to check if information is real or not, they leave that in the hands of journalists and the media. “We are a technology company, not a media company,” Mark Zuckerberg said in 2016, when asked about his opinion on the subject, a position that Facebook maintains to this day.

On this, the former vice president of Google Kristie Canegallo explained: “Providing reliable information on the Internet is enormously complex and an important responsibility. We strive to do better than anyone, but we still have work to do. We want to meet this challenge by improving our products, counteracting malicious actors seeking to spread misinformation, and giving users more context about the information they see."

People are constantly looking for answers to their questions, so it is believed that the Internet is the easiest way to find them. It would be prudent to demand more verification measures so that the information is more secure and thus know if it is valid or not, in order to give responsible use to new technologies.

Camilla Vainer is a BBG from BBYO: Argentina and loves to meet new people.

All views expressed on content written for The Shofar represent the opinions and thoughts of the individual authors. The author biography represents the author at the time in which they were in BBYO.

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