One of pet peeves is watching as others succumb to propaganda and bad information without question. People tend to only embrace facts that support their opinions and pre-conceived notions. The Internet is full of bad information being advertised as the truth and it keeps getting harder to recognise the truth.
Before the Internet if you wanted to study a subject in any detail you would have relied on books. Books that provided factual information were fact checked and references included. To get a book published required the publisher to commit resources to verify the content. A publisher could not afford to publish books with mistakes and still expect to generate revenu from the book sales. Of course mistakes have made it past the fact checkers and if that occurred the publisher could issue a retraction like the Newspapers often do when they get the various verifiable facts wrong. Today anyone can publish anything on the Internet without performing any fact checking. Once the information is in cyber-space people can use the incorrect data to formulate their opinions. In many online forums there will be someone who posts something that is not true (either by accident or on purpose) and there will be many who respond to this information as though it was the truth. By the time you get to the end of the discussion thread the fallacy will have been reinforced. In the more biased hardcore political forums if anyone tries to interject a correction that varies with the stated information they are often out numbered by those who believe they know the truth. This is what usually starts the flame war where facts tend to be ignored just to win the ongoing debate at all costs. The drive to "win" often overshadows the facts causing conflicts.
Truth is not a right-wrong binary construct. The determine the whole truth you must consider the context in which the information is being proferred. Context can include things such as location and time. People who study history and offer up their opinions on a past event can look at the facts but totally misunderstand the truth because of their viewpoint. We live our lives in the "now". We look at the world events using our lifetime experiences as the basis of our cognitive processes when trying to understand the facts. This can be obvious or subliminal in nature but it is an important factor in how we understand the world around us. Lacking context when trying to determine the truth provides the means in which understanding can be manipulated and twisted. In today's world we are surrounded by information that has been manipulated in such a fashion and if you do not make a sincere effort to see your way around this manipulation you will never really know the real truth.
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