Integrity of online contents

The Internet brings us convenience and fast services, but integrity of online contents is in doubt although there are trusted sites.

I have been contributing sports stories for the Footy Almanac, Melbourne based sports writing community, for more than four years. It provides true fans’ voices with great perceptions on sports, especially Australian Rules Football. Their success is magnificent and I am proud of being part of the Almanac family.

Opposed to it, dishonest behaviours are found on the internet so often.

Online dating sites are the platform of dishonesty to attract opposite sex. Giving false age is the biggest lie on the site, I believe. Then they could pretend to have good personalities and/or certain occupations.

Sadly many users are misled and start relationships, but end the romance so fast and easily.

Establishing relationships without seeing chemistry is blamed to such endings. The worst case is married people register and cheat on their partners.

Providers are less keen to inspect such inappropriate behaviours because of fears of losing profit due to decreasing number of clients and increasing cost of hiring more people to do such tasks, I heard.

I would urge them to take issues seriously, but unfortunately it seems users’ responsibilities to detect dishonesty.

However there are people who are bad at seeing distinct between honest people and others. I am one of them and admit I am not a good user of online dating sites.

Online feedback of any products can be misleading. Several years ago, I read an article on the West Australian newspaper’s website about commenting on restaurants’ services. The paper made a point that such comments were made to get discounted meals for the next dining by pretending to get bad customer services. Such dishonest people ruin the business and they might be jealous on success of the business.

The internet provides us freedom of the speech and everyone can create their blogs. That’s why I am writing here! It’s good.

But unlikely to printed contents, online contents can be published without editors’ inspections. Then writers can write whatever they want, even false facts.

Already having mentioned, it’s hard for me to detect dishonesty, I am not sure if I can trust any product/service or not.

Even some businesses are misleading on the Internet. It’s been reported that an online travel agency misled clients on room availabilities of hotels and travellers found out the booking not existed on their arrival and had no alternative accommodation.

Even the website provided false pictures and room types of the accommodation.

Then victims have criticised hotels not providing rooms that they were supposed to book.

I feel empathy to hotels for such dishonesty and troubles caused by misleading.

In my point, users should have contacted the hotels before their arrival to confirm their booking existing or not. In any case no booking has been found, they should complain the OTA.

From my past experiences, I do not trust OTA because of their bad customer services and their policy. I urge travellers to book their accommodation through their website directly.

It applies to airline, indeed. When I flew to Melbourne last year and in July this year, I booked flights directly on Qantas’ website.

We might need to take more responsibilities of trusting online contents.