Stardate 20011010.0539 (On Screen): Like many sites, CNN has a "mail this story" mechanism -- and it had a bug (since fixed) which permitted it to be used to mail links from off site, while disguising the fact that they were
from offsite. A guy in Michigan decided to try an experiment to see how fast disinformation moves on the net. He made a hoax page which looked like a CNN report claiming that Britney Spears had been killed in a car accident. (She's fine, by the way. There was no accident.) He then seeded the hoax by giving it to just three people in a chat room, and in 12 hours it had been loaded 150,000 times. The Internet is the most efficient mechanism known for distributing information, and apparently also for distributing disinformation. This could be militarily significant (as a means of distribution of propaganda), and it points out the danger of relying on a small number of sources for your information. The fact that you read something online doesn't mean that it's true.
It reinforces the need to always keep in mind the three questions that Ted Nelson recommends we ask whenever we read any statement anywhere: Who says? Who's he? How's he know? What person is the source of the information? How did that person find out? These are important things. "Independent confirmation" may not actually be independent, for instance. These days the news-gathering organizations constantly snoop on each other, and if one of them reports something incorrectly, many others will echo it, with or without attribution. The fact that both CNN and Reuters report something doesn't mean it's true, since one may be quoting the other and the other may have blown it. This has been happening quite a lot. One example were the reports of release of a hazardous liquid in a DC subway station yesterday; it turned out to be some sort of kitchen cleaner.
Hoaxes work because they tell us things we already want, or fear, to be true. Britney Spears will die someday (everybody does) and with as many celebrities as there are, statistically speaking there's a chance that someone famous will die suddenly and unexpectedly every few months. So this was a plausible hoax. The kinds of stories about further terrorist attacks which have been going around are the same way. The September 11 attack was so completely unexpected and so terrible in its consequences that it suddenly seems as if there is no attack mechanism which might not also be possible. Since then, every time there is any kind of problem with a jet (especially a crash) the first thing every one of us will think is "Oh, no, not again!" To many people it now seems as if terrorist attack is the explanation-of-choice for 
any air disaster. The initial misreport about the DC subway probably was not a hoax so much as a simple error by an overeager reporter; but it spread like wildfire because a chemical attack on a concentration of Americans by a terrorist is something we're all fearing we will see soon. (And it may yet happen.) And there was nerve gas released in a Tokyo subway. We need to take a deep breath and turn the skepticism filter up a couple of notches. (discussion in progress)
