> Its made-up numbers have also ended up in an academic paper and in a bank's investment research.
It's an excellent way of showing how unreliable the information you find online is (and it will only get worse in the future), but willfully creating misinformation and made up shit and offering it as fact feels hostile to humanity.
Surely nobody got hurt as a consequence of those "facts", but bad decisions with real world impact could be made regardless. It feels like the behavior should be shunned in a general case (the same way I'd shun those numerous spam sites that pollute search results and very much would prefer they not be allowed to exist), even if in this case the intent was good.
Problem is, you can't really do anything about it, other than figuring out a way to take down hostile sites and keep them from popping up, so it's even worse than fraud or even just bad research in academia.
It's an excellent way of showing how unreliable the information you find online is (and it will only get worse in the future), but willfully creating misinformation and made up shit and offering it as fact feels hostile to humanity.
Surely nobody got hurt as a consequence of those "facts", but bad decisions with real world impact could be made regardless. It feels like the behavior should be shunned in a general case (the same way I'd shun those numerous spam sites that pollute search results and very much would prefer they not be allowed to exist), even if in this case the intent was good.
Problem is, you can't really do anything about it, other than figuring out a way to take down hostile sites and keep them from popping up, so it's even worse than fraud or even just bad research in academia.