There is a harmful amount of information available nowadays. Due to the Internet, information is published, read, and duplicated myriad times in the amount of time it would have taken to publish the same information in a book or even a newspaper. Information is more fluid. The advent of social media in the last decade has given nearly anyone with a Wi-Fi connection the power to publish information for anyone to read. While this may be ideal for sharing news with friends and family about one’s daily life, it is also a medium for the spread of misinformation.

Anyone with a smartphone can post any statement for any number of people to read regardless of that statement’s validity. While it may be simple to correct an erroneous tweet or post online as quickly as it was created, it is far more difficult to combat the spread of the original statement; the correction does not have the same prominence as the original.

One of the most harmful examples of this phenomenon is the Wakefield study, published in 1998, which seemed to prove a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Years later, the study was debunked as it was shown that Wakefield had falsified his findings. Unfortunately, the study had spread widely throughout the Internet, especially in recent years, causing many concerned parents not to vaccinate their children for disease like measles. By 2004, vaccination rates in Britain fell to 80%. Today, 10% of parents in the United States do not vaccinate their children or delay the vaccinations for certain diseases. The most significant effect of this is the recent outbreak of measles in the west coast. The outbreak was centered on Disneyland in California, where individuals came into contact with someone who was infected with the disease. As of now, 149 individuals, 16 of whom were infants, are known to have contracted measles from this outbreak. The majority of the infected were not vaccinated.

Many do not vaccinate because they have read online that vaccinations can be more harmful than the disease itself. The average person, who has not studied immunology extensively, will find multiple sources online supporting this belief, some of which are scientific publications. However, even scientific publications can be misleading since a majority of papers publish results that cannot be reproduced. Also, many studies on vaccination side-effects are surveys rather than experiments, so they can only determine whether there is a correlation between vaccines and harmful effects; correlation does not imply causation. Unfortunately, one paper is enough for most people to develop reservations against vaccinations. The fear of vaccination-caused autism and other side effects becomes more prolific as a result.

While certain scientific papers pose some danger in persuading against vaccination, there is greater harm from sensationalized headlines. The Internet has increased the amount of information available at our fingertips. According to one study from UC San Diego, approximately 9,570,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes of information are consumed on the Internet yearly. That is the equivalent of a book stack tall enough to go to Neptune and back. There simply is not enough time to read all of this information. One has to decide between breadth and depth, reading a little of everything or reading all of a few selected topics. Unfortunately, breadth is preferred. Glossaries and indexes at the back of textbooks are forsaken now for online search engines and summaries that make finding needed facts much quicker. People have acclimatized to smaller articles that summarize what once spanned pages.

This trend is not limited to read information. For example, YouTube videos vary in length from seconds to hours. The majority of these videos, however, are under five minutes. By having information and media so readily accessible, people have lost the patience to focus on depth. The result is attention-grabbing headlines that are misleading out of context and individuals who do not take the time to learn the context of the claims these articles make. This creates misunderstandings that can lead to harmful effects like an outbreak of measles.

This is not meant to imply that we should disconnect from the Internet. It is undoubtedly the most significant technological advancement of the last few decades. Despite some of its harmful effects, the easy access to and publication of information online allow ideas to spread faster and stimulate positive growth and change. The necessary behavioral change is for people to understand the nature of this information. It is not as credible or thoroughly researched as what one would find in a textbook or in a newspaper. Even these sources are subject to bias and other factors that make them unreliable. The Internet facilitates the spread of new ideas, regardless of whether they are true or false.