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Fake News Story Games Thousands of Digg Users

Steve Rubel points to a fake Reuters news story that fooled hundreds of Digg users and many more readers. The story alleges that Sony is recalling its brand new Sony Playstation 3 console. You can read how it was done here.

This isn't the first time this has happened and it's not limited to socially driven news sites like digg. The blogosphere widely reported last week that Yahoo had acquired mybloglog after Techcrunch broke the story. An formal announcement has yet to be made.
All of this points to a real problem in the social media world. The only yardsticks we use to measure the trustworthiness of a source are purely based on popularity - e.g. in-bound links, votes, etc. Now often popularity and quality are closely aligned. However, both of these incidents demonstrate that the current system isn't working. We need more.

Someone - ideally a third party we trust - should start a star rating system similar to what works so well on eBay. It could become a standard the way tags are today. Even if this isn't a big sweeping movement, digg should adopt a similar system and the front page algorithm should take one's rating as well as vote into determining what stories rise to the front page.

Discussion

3 comments about 'Fake News Story Games Thousands of Digg Users'

Wikipedia, open source code, social networks (viral is more accurate), and popularity based search engines all suffer from lack of context. Google tries to minimize this, however it fails at it. Digg, does not even try to to do that.

I can't wait to hear how "ratings" are destroying the web, just like we heard this about Television, and Radio.

Posted by Mark at November 24, 2006 10:05 AM

This is a good example of the overall need for old fashioned editorial judgement. Open source journalism is something that can be of great value to all of us, but only if its accuracy can be ensured by some sort of editorial validation and fact checking. Kind of like what newspapers already do. Hmmm...isn't that an interesting concept.

Posted by KKeeshan at November 26, 2006 11:08 AM

The line between fiction and reality is becomming increasingly blurred. Actually, alot of the real news today sounds so unbelievable as if someone had made it up!

Posted by A Pigeon Called Frank at October 10, 2007 7:53 AM

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