Rumors, lies and innuendo spread far, wide and fast on the Internet

People shouldn't believe everything they read, especially on the internet. Anybody can write and post everything on the internet without the need to be accurate. Even The Wikipedia, world’s largest encyclopedia with nearly 900,000 articles in English, can not always be trusted because unlike other encyclopedias, anyone can contribute on writing this one. Like the comic above, the boy simply believe that the news is authentic because he read it in the official national-news.com without knowing that the writer of that news is just a kid.

See? People can lie about their identity. Internet is like a new world where we can be anybody we want. Another example is online dating. Many single men and women tries to find their luck on the internet by online dating and they sometime just believe everything by what is posted on the internet; like the handsome or beautiful photos, status, age, or even gender!

There is one recent news from Indonesia that a man married a woman he met on Facebook named Fransisca, after six months on marriage it turns out that the woman he married is a man named Rahmat! Rahmat fake his ID, birth certificate, to prove that he's a woman. Crazy right?

I once experienced Email scam, there was email from DHL telling me that some package has arrives for me and I should download the reference number on the attachment in order to collect my package, I just simply believe because DHL is one of the reliable mail service, but when i download the attachment it turns out to be virus. And days later I have similar email from FedEx and other mail services.

There are also many hoaxes posted on internet, I found a web calles The Top 15 hoaxes on internet, and these are some of them:

1. How to Charge an iPod with an Onion (2007)

The mostly-joke how-to site Household Hacker hit the big time with their viral video that purportedly demonstrated how to charge an iPod using nothing but an onion and a glass of Gatorade. The video was full of pseudo science that made it seem plausible, and it got a ton of press and frustrated a lot of people who plugged their electronics into vegetables.

2. The Derbyshire Fairy (2006)

As part of an elaborate April Fools Day prank, prop-maker Dan Baines of Derbyshire, England created what he told people was the corpse of a “fairy,” and put it up for sale on eBay and on his web site. His prop was perhaps a little too well made, and resulted in his site getting over 20,000 visits in one day. Even after he revealed the whole thing was a hoax, Baines still received emails from fairy believers accusing him of covering up the truth with his hoax story.

For more of these you can go here.

So, what can we do to prevent these kind of things? Be skeptical; don’t assume information online is true, try to determine who’s responsible for the site, whether an individual, institution, university, government, media organization, etc., try to determine the purpose and audience of the site, look for an indication of how current the material is. (http://www.jimkarpen.com/wikipedia-lies.html)