Can we untangle this web of deceit?

I was intrigued to discover recently that I am a secret services mouthpiece designed to undermine the left by publishing neo-conservative views and apologies for racism.

I was intrigued to discover recently that I am a secret services mouthpiece designed to undermine the left by publishing neo-conservative views and apologies for racism. Evidence for this includes the damning fact that I was recently invited to give a talk at a school where one of the teachers is an ex-boyfriend, from 1989, of another alleged MI5 agent.

You'll not be surprised to learn that these ludicrous allegations were made on the internet. The web has become a clearing house for all sorts of nonsense ideas. If they stayed in cyberspace, we could afford to laugh them off. But they don't. Increasingly, people are finding that untruths spread on the web follow them around in real life, too.

I've often gone to talks and recognised the out-of-date and inaccurate introduction cut and pasted straight from web pages, so you can see why I'm not sanguine about the prospect of someone changing my Wikipedia entry to say I'm a supporter of the far-right.

It's not just me, of course. The political blogger Alex Hilton, for example, was once falsely described in a local London newspaper as being a distant cousin of Paris Hilton. This factoid has been incorporated into his Wikipedia entry and is now widely repeated.

Many of the most enthusiastic pioneers of the internet have now become seriously worried about its capacity to promulgate lies and distortions. Larry Sanger, one of the co-founders of Wikipedia, became so disillusioned that he started Citizendium as an attempt to bring more quality control to online, collaborative encyclopaedias. Just last week, the creator of the internet, Tim Berners-Lee, also said that we need to find ways to control the spread of falsehoods on the web.

I share their concerns, but I wonder if blaming the web is just shooting the messenger for radically upping his productivity. The internet has simply enabled much more information, true and false, to be spread and shared much more quickly. For better and for worse, we are going to continue living in an age where the quantity of information available far surpasses our abilities to assess its quality.

Sure, it would be good if we could get a more accurate version of Wikipedia, or protect people from libellous comments on prominent websites. But this can only break the waves, it cannot stem the tide. If we cannot damn or control the information flow, we need to become much better at filtering it for ourselves. People's willingness to believe what they see online does not show that the web has made us too trusting, it merely exposes how credulous we already were.

Getting more clued up requires understanding why it is we are so frequently fooled. To do this, we need to learn not only about faulty logic, but our psychological weaknesses. For example, we tend to be too impressed by the mere volume of evidence marshalled in support of a case. But no amount of bad evidence adds up to good evidence. Nor should we forget that the size of even a good dossier of evidence can only be judged to be impressive or insufficient when it is compared to the size and contents of the dossier against.

There are signs that people are already equipping themselves to cope with the information tsunami. Between starting to write my own contribution - a book on bad arguments and rhetoric - and it coming out, I've noticed other books have also appeared with similar agendas, such as Damian Thompson's Counterknowledge and Richard Wilson's Don't Be Fooled Again.

I'm hopeful that the information overload might be provoking a long-overdue upgrading of the general population's capacity to distinguish for itself between good and bad arguments. Rather than blaming the internet, we need to attribute responsibility to the right place, which is with people who dish out the falsehoods in the first place, and ourselves for swallowing them too easily.