In Internet We Trust…or do we?

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San Francisco, California – People who publish on the Internet are liars, exaggerators, manipulators and fraudsters. They’re also truthful, honest, open and even naive. They are, in that respect, just a collection of people like any other collection of people. So what’s new?

Well, what’s new is that an entire generation of digital natives (those who grew up with the Web) are unquestioning of the integrity of Web just as us older people never rarely think of questionning a segment on NPR or an editorial in the New York Times. We just don’t do it, and by and large that’s because we know these news sources have fact-checkers and complaints commissions and so forth. In short, we trust them. (Yes, yes, I know the Times has had a few issues with honesty of late, but go with me here…)

The thing is the digital natives trust their sources too – only many of their de facto news and gossip destinations don’t have fact checkers, nor editorial policies, nor are they regulated. In fact, as the New York Times pointed out in a great piece about the online encyclopedia Wikipedia this week, in some instances these new media news and reference sites are straight out lying to their millions of readers and getting away with it!

Sure, most Wikipedians are honest contributors, but Wikipedia’s technology does not discern between those honest folks and those who are out to record their own version of history. (Who said the victors are those who write history – it’s the Wikipedians!)

This scenario and others like it clearly present a massive potential headache for PR professionals seeking to protect or enhance reputations.

As we’ve posted previously, most are still struggling to figure out who the influential bloggers are in the blogosphere, and so I fear the prospect of being unable to force a retraction or correction from a news source with millions of readers that is blatantly lying about a client may push some over the edge. So, what to do?

Well, as the Times points out, all citizens are perfectly entitled to pursue claims of defamation through the law courts, but that hardly seems a useful solution.

No, all signs point to PR pros learning more about building relationships and influence within the blogosphere to support their position and to diffuse that of their opponents. After all, don’t publications sell copies by taking opposing stances to rival titles? Isn’t that why Forbes decided to bash bloggers while BusinessWeek hailed them?

But here’s one other idea: How about Google adding a feature to its toolbar that lets users rate Web pages for honesty?

David.