The Trouble with Anonymity on the Web

Anonymity online is on the rise, allowing people to write, lie and manipulate data without feeling responsible for it. But who’s doing all this hiding? Hint: It’s not angry, pajama-wearing bloggers.

And now the public can see all if they visit Griffith’s Wikiscanner site. Turns out that all the anonymous propaganda and lies on Wikipedia aren’t coming from basement dwellers at all — they’re coming from Congress, the CIA, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the American Civil Liberties Union. Somebody at Halliburton deleted key information from an entry on war crimes; Diebold, an electronic-voting machine manufacturer, deleted sections of its entry about a lawsuit filed against it. Someone at Pepsi deleted information about health problems caused by the soft drink. Somebody at The New York Times deleted huge chunks of information from the entry on the Wall Street Journal. And of course, the CIA has been editing the entry on the Iraq war.

Proof of why we should always question the validity of every bit of information that passes our way. Research the information from multiple sources until we become educated enough to have an opinion. And long before we pass that information on to someone else.