Post #2

The article "Web Hoaxes, Counterfeit Sites, and Other Spurious Information on the Internet", by Paul S. Piper, discusses websites found on the internet that you need to be wary of. These include: counterfeit, malicious, product, fictitious, parodies/spoofs/entertainment, hacks, and disinformation. A counterfeit website will usually look pretty official, as it probably has based itself off the template/style of the real website it is skewing. Piper writes that the counterfeit website is the most troublesome of the bunch, because it may not always be trying to achieve humor, and either way, they are often misconstrued. For example, it could be an official-looking website dealing with a historic figure that passes off lies as facts, aimed towards a younger crowd which would spread its false ideas quite diversely, if they were researching said person. Product sites, though legitimate, are still an advertisement to try to sell you something, which should always be taken with a grain of salt. Fictitious sites can deal with anything from a made-up city to an imaginary animal and are not usually very harmful (unless you are very gullible). Parody/spoof sites are mainly for entertainment, and although its content could be satirizing politics, current events, etc., their "misinformation" should be obvious in its' ridiculousness and lack of sources. Hacked websites are when legit or official websites are modified in any which way by "hackers" and can usually be corrected. However, this is least likely to occur in government sponsored websites because they would be harder to "hack." Disinformation websites usually consist of opinions over facts that steer bias' to a certain agenda or stance and can potentially be very misleading, thus harmful.

The internet is becoming the number 1 source to get information, whether it be for a school-issued paper, getting your daily news, researching a topic of interest, whatever. I know personally I've researched thousands of topics using the internet and have run into several of the websites that Piper described in his article, which is why its very important to be able to recognize these kinds of sites that could potentially lead you to believe false information or develop a bias unwillingly, etc. Of course, even before the internet, there were always "those magazines" or "those television programs" that you were taught, or just learned through experience, to be wary of - such as magazines that may advertise that Michael Jackson had aliens living with him on Neverland Ranch or bias television programs like FOX News pundits'. I feel that everything in this article I've learned already through several years' experience online and plain intuition, but there may be those whose perception would not pick up on these kinds of hoaxes, etc. and I would strongly urge them to read this article.