These questions should be asked of any information source, not just those on the Internet. The Internet merely made it obvious that information doesn’t have to be true or relevant just because it’s available.
Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back—like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust, but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV. One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.1
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