How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth; New York Times, 11/2/16

Farhad Manjoo, New York Times; How the Internet Is Loosening Our Grip on the Truth:

"Next week, if all goes well, someone will win the presidency. What happens after that is anyone’s guess. Will the losing side believe the results? Will the bulk of Americans recognize the legitimacy of the new president? And will we all be able to clean up the piles of lies, hoaxes and other dung that have been hurled so freely in this hyper-charged, fact-free election?

Much of that remains unclear, because the internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. Polls show that many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about “basic facts.”

For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. That has not been the case...

“There’s always more work to be done,” said Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of Snopes.com, one of the internet’s oldest rumor-checking sites. “There’s always more. It’s Sisyphean — we’re all pushing that boulder up the hill, only to see it roll back down.”"

Online ‘Swatting’ Becomes a Hazard for Popular Video Gamers and Police Responders; New York Times, 3/20/15

Nick Wingfield, New York Times; Online ‘Swatting’ Becomes a Hazard for Popular Video Gamers and Police Responders:

"Swatting has become enough of a drain on local resources that the state’s attorney for Will County in Illinois, James W. Glasgow, recently proposed state legislation that would require defendants found guilty of swatting to pay back municipalities for calling on emergency responders. Swatting victims say they have been able to prevent repeated raids at their homes by asking the police to note in records available to emergency dispatchers that they are likely targets.

Tracking the culprits behind the pranks is difficult. While bomb scares and other hoaxes have been around for decades, making threats anonymously has never been so easy.

Swatters use text messages and online phone services like Skype to relay their threats, employing techniques to make themselves hard to trace. They obtain personal addresses for their victims through property records and other public databases, or by tricking businesses or customer service representatives at a victim’s Internet provider into revealing the information."