Huffington Post author Sam Stein penned an article today titled “Palin Makes Her First Gaffe“, calling out the GOP Vice Presidential pick for falsely stating that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are US tax payer burdens (prior to the government takeover on 9/9/08). After watching the video, there’s no question that she inappropriately classified the mortgage giants as government subsidized.

The article soon found itself on Digg, a social news site where the site’s users democratically choose the main content. Each article is “dugg” up or down based on a vote-per-article available to each person. In the fashion of democracy, the community members also have a common-man’s veto, used to mark an article as inaccurate. Once a certain number of people mark the article as such, the declaration of inaccuracy is displayed prominently whenever the article is viewed (see the image below).

This veto serves to alert users to potentially false information and carries a heavy statement with it: “The population of this community has deemed this content incorrect; do not read it.” Thus, any marked link appears fallacious and is in turn skipped by a majority of the users. This tool’s biggest issue is the ease of exploitation by a mob and this story is about that.

Briefly, this touches on an issue I’ve run into many times when researching political topics: What information is valid? Publication houses still act as sentinels for published, hard-copy materials. But, in an increasingly digitized world, where everyone has the capability to disseminate information, these watchmen are not present.

In Naomi Campell’s book The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, she mentions disinformation and refers specifically to Joseph Goebbels, German minister of propaganda during World War II, and his effective use of thought manipulation. Over time–or perhaps because of Goebbel’s malicious use of it–propaganda came to carry a negative meaning.

With respect to Digg, in this politically charged time, the denotation of an article as inaccurate has become synonymous with an attempt at smearing–or propagandizing–the opposing person’s candidate. While marking inaccurate has worked sufficiently in the past, this article, and three others like it, have been marked inappropriately so. This presents a problem for interpretation in the future.

Humans rely on formal institutions to provide trustworthy information; we built our lives around it. We started by learning math, science, and reading based on curricula sanctioned by our schools and governments. Imagine if that information turned out to be wrong. It’s analogous to being in space with nothing around: you’d know neither up from down nor left from right. Your ability to discern direction would disappear.
And true information is the way forward; facts are what we stand on as we reach for the next level of understanding.

In modern politics, it has become trendy to paint things in shades of gray, disallowing any perception of truth; and it’s worrisome. How do we expect our society to understand such complex things the economy, health care, and foreign relations when we question such solid facts? Palin was videotaped in this instance, the damning words and images made available for replay; yet somehow this article was deemed inaccurate. This is how it begins, the slow blurring of true and false. Will they next have us doubting the science of tapes and cameras and our technology’s ability to accurately portray history?

If this seems alarming that’s because it is. Good information is absolutely critical to good decision making. Our minds are being polluted and we’re being duped in the most insulting and damaging way. I’m coming to find that truth usually sides with virtue and honor, which clarifies what’s true quite a bit.