It certainly looked trustworthy.

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It's incredibly easy to build a web site that looks professional enough to be believeable. One of my favorites, for instance is a site devoted to reporting the dangers of di-hydrogen monoxide - "the invisible killer". Numerous sites reprint or expound on the same basic story - a Google search brings up over 900 pages that report that tell of the chemical and also include the word "danger". The name of the chemical itself shows up on over 30,000 pages - though of course I didn't check how many of these tell the same story. The Snopes Urban Legends site reports that in 1997 a junior high school student received a prize at a science fair with a report on di-hydrogen monoxide - except that what he'd done was conduct a study on how many people believed the story. The About.com sub-site on urban legends tell us that the story was started in 1988. What I find most fascinating about all this, however, is our tendency to believe the story because of the trustworthy layout of the site. Another page (one among many), for instance, copies the same material, but presents it in an amateurish fashion that has "joke" written all over it.

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Go to: Don't take my word for it, or
Go to: Equal in the eyes of cyberspace.