A lot of people swear by the internet as a research tool. I seldom use it, for the simple reason that it is unreliable.
Take the following case in point: On the internet recently was a message, supposedly from a Toronto law firm, saying Canada Post intended to recoup money lost by people not using its services by putting a five cent surcharge “on every e-mail delivered, by billing internet service providers at source.” The service providers would in turn bill the user.
The surcharge, the message said, was covered by Bill 602P. A Toronto lawyer was said to be working without pay to ensure the bill never became law.
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A Liberal MP was said to have suggested that a $20 to $40 surcharge should be levied for internet use, over and above the proposed e-mail charge.
A friend showed the e-mail to me last week and asked whether it was true.
I was inclined to say no. It just didn’t feel right.
The national weekly newspaper association has a committee in contact with Canada Post and to my knowledge nothing had been sent to publishers suggesting something like this was in the works.
And bills in Parliament are always numbered with a C in front, not a P behind.
But still … it could be. I said I would check. Before I could make any calls, I began getting e-mail from across the country saying the first e-mail message was a hoax.
Canada Post issued an e-mail release to the effect that the “internet rumor … is entirely fictitious.”
The Liberal MP, the bill and the lawyer named in the message don’t exist, the Canada Post release said.
End of story? Not quite.
At least one community newspaper editor had a red face after publishing the e-mail as fact.
You see, that’s one of the problems with the internet.
Put something on it with enough facts that it could be true and you will always have some people taking it at face value and you can be sure at least some of those people will pass on the information as fact.
Even when someone issues a disclaimer, as Canada Post did, there will always be some who either don’t see it or who don’t believe the disclaimer.
Not possible? Remember Hitler’s big lie technique. The bigger the lie, the more people who will believe it.
Abraham Lincoln held that you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.
With the internet, I’m not so sure.
