“You can’t trust what you read on the internet” – A good friend.
There are many people who often say things like this, how you can’t trust people, websites or anything on the internet. The idea that anyone can go out and pretend to be someone else.
After thinking about this, I asked myself: “Why should we trust what anyone writes?”. The internet as a whole seems to have a bad reputation when it comes to the validity of things written on it.
Take this example: If you read something on the internet from a random site written by a random person, you could at least doubt what he says and check the validity of his sources. On the other hand if you read the same thing in a random book, you are more likely to believe what they say.
There is also the matter of presentation. A well presented website that is not littered with obscuring adverts causes you to trust it’s validity more than one that has lots of adverts and has a broken formatting. In fact xkcd has a very relevant comic on this: xkcd 906.
My point is, there is no reason for you to trust things written by strangers, but there’s no reason not to either. Why would they lie?
People lie all the time, whether it’s to keep a secret, to be accepted or for ulterior motives. There’s always a reason why people lie, even if they don’t want to share it. The internet is just like the world, people lie and people are dicks to each other, but there are people who are nice and people who are helpful. Just because there are people out there who are nasty and horrible doesn’t make us all pre-judge each other, so why should we pre-judge things that we read on the internet? If we give new people we meet a chance to show their character, why should we not give strangers on the internet a chance to show their opinions?