The article "Truth Lies Here" by Michael Hirschorn, published in The Atlantic Magazine provides some very interesting food for thought about how truth is determined on the Internet. This is highly recommended reading.
Hirschorn questions conventional wisdom of the early social-media era held that the end of mainstream-media dominance would create a democratisation of truth and provides some compelling case studies that underline the flaws in this idealist view of people power.
The distortion of truth is apparently particularly bad in the arena of (surprise, surprise) politics. One of the favoured tactics being to make outlandish claims that are clearly incorrect via platforms such as Twitter to garner support for a particular opinion. The sensationalist claim gets re-tweeted and often picked up as headline news, while the inevitable correction gets buried and almost completely ignored.
The over-riding question is "In a time when mainstream news organisations have already ceded a substantial chunk of their opinion-shaping influence to Web-based partisans on the left and right, does each side now feel entitled to its own facts as well?"
It's quite long but definitely worth the effort http://tiny.cc/o8nnm.
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