Essay 2 by Rasmus

Social Medias like blogs, communities, forums and wikis is made in a totally different way than the traditional media channels (radio, tv, news papers) when it comes to quality and rectification. Since the new Social Medias is open for influence from the general public it does require a totally new control of quality and solutions to prevent spam and different kinds of destruction and frauds. You have to customize those solutions so they are adapted to the media and this is something I intend to write about.

When it comes to blogs does it not require a sophisticated control of quality since a bad blog doesn't get read by the general public. On the other hand does the simplicity in creations of blog posts it easy for a spammer to use the blog tools to create temporary web pages used in spam attacks and to prevent that the blog network owners use a control question which is hard for a computer to answer so the registration process cannot be made automatic. This worked fine as a protection for a long time but nowadays these protections gets cracked from time to time and when that occurs it quickly gets used by spammer who creates deceitful blogs with advertising.

Communities and forums does need an additional defense since the medium can be used for both destruction, spam and other illegal activities like child pornography and different kinds of frauds. The anonymity for the users at the community makes it easy for different kind of "bad" users to register at the page. Therefore many of the communities do use different kinds of functions to report users to the administrators who can remove the user. I think this is an inefficient system since the deleted user easily can create a new account. I don't know if it already exists today but I think an automatic system that recognizes when a user for example sends out spam to other user automatically blocks the and hides that users post.

Both forums and wikis have a problem with invalid facts. The big wiki called Wikipedia does have a requirement that everything that is written at the page is have good references to trusted source but that isn't always pursued and it is some time hard to verify the sources. This makes it hard for Wikipedia to be accepted as a real encyclopedia which I think is there goal. In many courses I've read at KTH Wikipedia isn't accepted as a source simply because it can be unreliable, especially when it comes to "hot" subjects that engages many people. Thus the information often is corrected quickly there is a risk that you look at the article at the wrong time and therefore gets wrongful facts.