Jonathan Miller reports on how the Internet has become a seething mass of fraud and disinformation
Last month, media around the world picked up on the story that a teenage couple in the United States were preparing to lose their virginity live on the Internet. A special website had even been established to broadcast this moment of tendresse.
Millions promptly pointed their browsers at to find a photograph of a winsome couple named Mark and Diane, their faces obscured. It looked as though it would be the hottest Net event of all time.
But within a day, the breathless media reported, there had been a hitch. The couple needed $75 000 to rent equipment necessary for the Web broadcast. To recoup the costs Web surfers would be charged $5 to tune in. Nevertheless, insisted the couple’s lawyer, they remained determined to share their moment with the world.
At this, alarm bells ought to have been ringing in every newsroom in the world. It was left to the St Louis Post Dispatch to reveal that none of this was as billed. In fact, it revealed, the website was the idea of one Ken Tipton, a former video store owner from Missouri, who fled to Los Angeles several years ago after he received death threats over the pornographic titles he stocked at his shops.
Tellingly, too, Web broadcasting facilities were to have been provided by a company named IEG, responsible for the Internet marketing of a sex video starring former Bay Watch star Pamela Anderson and rock star Tommy Lee.
According to the Post Dispatch, after collecting possibly millions from hopeful voyeurs, Mark and Diane may have been planning, live on the Net, to announce they had changed their minds, and would not have intercourse after all. The whole thing was a stunt, and those who treat the Internet as a source of information should start sitting up and taking notice. Because it is not the only time we have been fooled.
Pace Bill Gates, the Internet is humankind’s most significant invention of the century – the harbinger of the 21st-century digital society. It is already the platform for millions and millions of pages of information. Thanks to the Internet, the world is finally a village; the Internet its parish pump.
But strip away the hype and the Internet is a network in danger of imploding on its own conceit, with or without the 2000 bug. The cybernetic parish pump is ceaselessly pumping drivel into an ocean of sludge.
Consider, for example, the Internet’s current hysteria: the millennium bug. Across the US, survivalists are digging in. According to their websites, the crash will be even more severe than predicted, causing nuclear power stations to blow up, the financial system to melt down, shutting down all law and order, banking, power, transportation, health care and food distribution for six months or longer.
Families should prepare to move to rural retreats and grow their own food, advises . “Gold, bullets, food, cigarettes, candles, clean water etc will be the new currencies,” says the site. Expect a run on banks and stocks before the end of 1999. We are facing a near-term disaster.”
None of this is remotely likely to be true, but in the miasma of data, it is par for the course. The Internet is a web of lies. Not everything on the Internet is false, of course – but separating the mendacious from the veracious is rapidly becoming impossible. There is no comprehensive indexing or cataloguing. Some quantity of Internet information is actually dependable, its authorship verifiable. But it is not always possible to find it.
The vaunted search engines such as Altavista, Hotbot, Infoseek and Yahoo! often produce results that are worse than useless. Dick Armey, majority leader of the US House of Representatives, not long ago ordered a tribute to Bob Hope read on the floor of the Congress after an aide handed him a story printed out from the Internet that the entertainer had died. But Hope was not dead – the Associated Press had moved the story to its website by mistake.
Thousands of people around the world received by e-mail the text of Kurt Vonnegut’s commencement address to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduating class, even though he had never spoken there. The e-mail was a hoax. These are not computer viruses of the sort that make your hard disc crash, but information viruses, polluting the information ecology.
The difficulty in distinguishing between lies and truth on the Net has provoked the launch of , a website devoted to the computer industry, to build an online Internet lie detector test, puncturing among other things many of the hysterical myths surrounding the millennium bug. Cnet’s conclusion is that it is real, but nowhere close to as big a problem as some self-interested consultants claim.
The lie detector reveals the extent to which Internet-relayed information is often uncommonly difficult to distinguish from reality: Larry Walters soared 4,8km above Los Angeles in a lawn chair tethered to helium weather balloons (true). Patterns in the eye’s iris, analysed through the technique of iridology, provide accurate information about the health of the body (false).
Frequently, invention from the Internet leaks into the mainstream media, sometimes by those who should know better. Veteran correspondent Pierre Salinger caused a sensation last year when he announced that he had discovered documents on the Internet proving that TWA’s flight 770 to Paris was the victim of friendly fire from a US missile test. The document was an Internet forgery.
There is nothing wrong per se with fiction on the Internet. Much of it is weird and some rather wonderful. At is a catalogue of many of the tall tales, heroic inventions and established myths which have gained currency on the Internet, including the baby train (mysterious train moves around America abducting babies) and the famous Mexican pet (woman finds cute stray dog in Tijuana and takes it home to learn it is a Mexican sewer rat dying from a horrible transmissible disease).
This is all just fun. But other information on the Internet is potentially life threatening. The website operated by Dr Stephen Barrett in Pennsylvania fights health-related frauds, myths, fads, and fallacies, including health marketing scams and misleading medical information. It has demolished dozens of myths, cures, diets and marketing scams. But the struggle to introduce a reality check to the Net is unequal. Anyone with a modicum of technological knowledge can broadcast to perhaps 500-million people around the world.
The problem is the sheer quantity of information. The thousands of hits produced by search engines offer an illusion of authority which is utterly undeserved. Tools to sift out the good information are crude at best. The product of these searches is frequently an almost random selection of references that often do not include the sources that really matter. The technology of search engines and “web crawlers” itself creates an open field for hoaxes, liars, conspiracy theorists, political extremists, people offering dubious financial propositions, and pornographers.
Using invisible “meta-tagging” of Web pages, many of these operators know how to manipulate search engines to make their own sites pop up first. Search for the name Monica Lewinksy at , Wired magazine’s admired search engine, and in the initial screen of links returned to you will be found the Welcome to MonicaVision site, an I Love Monica Lewinski Site and a site imaginatively titled “sex adult xxx pictures monica lewinsky sex”.
Chris Locke, lecturer in electronic communications at University College, London, says: “The problem is that the Web organisation is a mess. There is no structure to organise the information.” Locke says specialists are working on a common tagging discipline that might bring some order to the chaos but the solution may be distant and hard to impose.
But just because pages may be catalogued will not make them any more accurate. Even on sites with a pretence at offering an accurate journalistic record, traditional checking and sourcing is only rarely applied.
“We live in an age of news too fresh to have to be true,” says David Weir, an American investigative journalist and lecturer. At a London digital media conference organised by City University’s journalism department this month, Weir warned that while the Internet is hardly to blame for all bad journalism, there are grave implications for accuracy. Constant repetition and rewriting means that stories advance through the news cycle on the basis of spin rather than factual development.
“Who is in control of the story in an interactive environment where audience and journalists can add to, copy, subtract from and otherwise adjust the original posting or publication?” Weir asks. The implication is blunt: as the Internet becomes a gigantic repository for so much copied, mutilated and spin- distorted information and misinformation, it becomes ever harder for readers to know what is true, what is rumour, and who can be trusted.
The special vulnerability of the Internet is documented in Stephen Brill’s new Content magazine, the US magazine which offered a lengthy deconstruction of many of the stories surrounding the investigation of President Bill Clinton and Lewinsky. Brill describes the effect of a report on the Dallas Morning News website that a government witness was prepared to testify to having seen Clinton and Lewinsky in a compromising position.
This was instantly picked up by Larry King, CNN chat show host, who announced it live on the air, and then by other chat shows.
While millions of Americans buzzed with this new astonishment, 90 minutes later, the website retracted its story. Months later, the retraction has still to catch up with the myth.
At the heart of many of the more disingenuous stories about Lewinsky and much else is America’s hottest buccaneer journalist, Matt Drudge, the 31-year-old editor and publisher of the Drudge Report, an Internet site and electronic mailing list of gossip, titbits and scandal that routinely gets more than six-million visitors a week. With no formal journalism training he appals serious American journalists. The White House calls him a “dirty” source and refuses to comment on his stories.
Drudge is unapologetic. “All truths begin as hearsay as far as I’m concerned,” he says. Drudge, like it or not, looks like the future. On the Internet, it has become more important to be cool, than true.