@Caute_cautim wrote:
@rslade @CraginS You guys are great at promoting Christmas spiritual essence.
John, thank you for the compliment. Now, to address the complementary portions of your post.
@Caute_cautim wrote:
... At this rate, it will become so confusing, that people will just accept what they see without challenging where the original source information came from and then anything that is issued will become an endless loop of lies and more lies.
...
Given the widespread acceptance of information from Wikipedia, with its plethora of both inadvertently and intentionally embedded mistakes, falsehoods, and biases, it appears that the general public has already gone deeply into the acceptance as true anything that has been published. This acceptance of publication actually predates Wikipedia. Some of the more mature readers will recall when Pierre Salinger, retired former press secretary to President Kennedy, while living as an expat in Paris, fully accepted one of the more outrageous conspiracy theories about the 1996 TWA 800 airliner explosion over New York. He knew it was true because he had read all about it on THE INTERNET! {See The Media Downing of Pierre Salinger: Journalistic Mistrust of the Internet as a News Source.]
@Caute_cautim wrote:
... Which then raises the whole question of ethics and honesty and now I see the FBI and others are promising to introduce more false information to put the attackers off directly.
Ethics is a highly complex philosophical topic, and we should recall that absolute open honesty (and transparency) is not a core feature of any ethical standard in current practice. There are always complications and provisions given context. For instance, deception for the purpose of military and diplomatic progress is fully accepted across the world.
@Caute_cautim wrote:
... Yet there are laws out there within the US constitution against such issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_false_statements So why is it no one has formally raised this previously with search engines and challenged them? ...
...
While the U.S. Constitution is the authority for all laws in the U.S., there is no such law in within the Constitution. Further, there is no law that makes publishing falsehoods a crime. All of the laws discussed in the Wikipedia article you linked are about falsehoods made to governmental entities within the course of government business and in their jurisdiction, which has been established by the laws empowering those governmental entities. That is why no search engine, and in fact, no book, newspaper, or website, has ever been brought into legal jeopardy for simply publishing untrue statements.
@Caute_cautim wrote:...
Or is the whole world run on false information?...
Yeah, pretty much. The challenge is discerning what proportion of information in front of you is true, what proportion is false, and what proportion is true but misleading due to lack of context or lack of common definitions and terminology.
Merry Christmas!
Craig
