Last week, according to credible online sources, Google hired its youngest employee, 15 year-old Tom Vendetta. That is, if your “credible” sources are Google News, Digg and other online news aggregators. Online news sites ran with the story, using the following “press release” as their source:
15 year old student, Tom Vendetta has been hired by search engine giant Google Inc. The student will receive a lowered salary, which will be placed into a bank account for future education, said Google CEO Larry Page. When asked what role Vendetta will play at the Tech Giant’s offices, Page said he wouldnt have a role at the Main Offices. Instead he would work from his home in the New Jersey suburbs. Vendetta will be incharge of working with recent security flaw’s in Google’s beta e-mail service, “Gmail”. Google said they first found out about him when they discovered the student’s blog, at http://tomvendetta.be. The media giant said they looked forward to working with Vendetta’s expertise in JavaScript and AJAX.
Once the Internet was saturated with the news, Tom Vendetta realized things had gotten out of hand. The press release was actually nothing more than a practical joke Tom was trying to play on his friends. Vendetta submitted the fake release through the free news service I-Newswire. It was a trick he had learned reading this blog posting. He confessed the prank on his blog. It seems obvious to me that he intended no harm and I actually think it will ultimately have a positive effect on Internet news in general.
This incident reveals a potential weakness of this new “Web 2.0” world, in which stories spread almost instantaneously and where news readers become news creators. Two different kinds of news aggregators were fooled by the false story – Google News, which uses an automated method to compile its news pages and Digg, a site where users decide whether or not a story is worthy of the front page.
Traditionally, news editors or other individuals would be responsible for analyzing stories and content and then deciding whether it was credible and newsworthy. In the current web environment, the news consumer is gaining more power over what stories are considered news. Using Digg as an example, a story does not have to be particularly important to make the front page, only interesting to enough people. As the case with this phony press release highlights, a story does not even have to be true.
This incident is not very concerning to me with regards to sites like Digg. I do not view Digg as a news source, but as more of an “interesting links” source. By the way, I absolutely love Digg. What is a bit troubling is that the story made headlines on Google News, which I did consider to be a news source. Considering the fact that Google’s headlines are compiled by spiders or other automated systems that crawl the web looking for news, we really should not be surprised that something like this could happen. Google should probably modify their criteria and remove sites that allow free, unverified press releases (such as I-Newswire) from their news aggregation. Google should also consider allocating more resources (as in human beings) to the validation of their news stories.
Do I trust an automated system to present me with the news as much as I trust a news organization such as Fox News or even CNN? No, I do not. Do I trust a social bookmarking site such as Digg as much as I trust my traditional news sources? Again, the answer is no. In a “real” news organization, an editor or some other responsible person would have looked at this story, noticed the numerous grammatical errors and the fact that it was submitted via a free service and then maybe called the HR department and asked, “So, umm, did we actually hire a 15 year-old kid?” Since Google News is automated though, this analysis never occurred.
I don’t want to give the impression that I think traditional news sources are perfect. Given the Jason Blair, Stephen Glass and forged documents scandals, mainstream news is susceptible to abuse and the propagation of false information too. On a side note, I highly recommend Shattered Glass, the story of Stephen Glass.
In today’s Internet age, we are all bombarded with information from every direction. As consumers of the news, we must train ourselves to judge both the source of a story and the method in which it became news as much as we judge a story itself.
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I think you summed up the issues of modern information distribution very nicely.
To me, sites like digg and other social sites could even have a slight upper hand against inaccurate information, in that once a story is found to contain inaccuracies, the community can issue a response and correction, often more notable that the corrections issued in tiny print at the bottom of the D section of the newspaper, or at the end of a newscast. I think specifically about the Steve Mallett story that was tracked by the digg community. (http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/steve-mallett-digg-code.html)
Great post, Zack. It’s up to us to be the filter for the good and bad information we’re presented with. There’s plenty of both, ready for consumption every second of the day.
David Russell
March 15th, 2006