I'm glad that that I've been seeing the sentiment "You're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts" cropping up in my online wanderings lately. Mainly because it's a tiny glimmer of hope that folks might be developing a (justifiable) intolerance for a world where the ephemeral fads of celebrities trump years--if not decades--of peer-reviewed science. It can't come too soon, as mainstream news-reporting and, to a degree, political leadership seems, in an alarming number of cases, to be abdicating responsibility to crowd-sourcing.
Apart from the obvious consideration that crowds (in the flesh or online) are notoriously fickle and prone to stampeding in the direction dictated by the loudest--and too often least reasonable--voice, there's no room for nuance. Because, for all the talk of a semantic web, it's just that--talk. Even controlling for sock-puppets, trolls, comment-spam, respondent self-selection, etc., no software in the world can detect sarcasm, irony or satire. Let's face it, there are too many times that political/social reality and The Onion have been virtually indistinguishable.
The bottom line is to never mistake aggregation--collecting information--for validation--verifying that the data back it up.
