"Fiction is self-perpetuating" There are several ways that people react to this. One way is to see it as a fundamental and unique fault to the internet and use

"Fiction is self-perpetuating" There are several ways that people react to this. One way is to see it as a fundamental and unique fault to the internet and use it as a reason to write off the internet as a useful or serious medium. This is a mistake. Another is to see it as an opportunity to reevaluate our assumptions of trustworthiness in general. The truth is that no encyclopedia is more trustworthy than Wikipedia, no news medium is more trustworthy than the internet. We've merely been willing to abide by the faults and biases of familiar media. But what you see on tv, what you read in the paper, what you read in books; all of it is just as vulnerable to persistence of fiction as the internet. In some cases we tend not to be aware of such things merely because it's harder to check.