URLs Matter . . . Except When They Don’t

URLs Matter . . . Except When They Don’t

For as long as there’s been a web, teachers have been telling us to examine the URL.

Generally good advice. You press on a link and think you’re headed in one direction, but because you didn’t look at the URL, you end up sliding into disinformation oblivion. Consider a story that made the rounds a few years ago: President Obama signed an executive order banning the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools. Utter and complete nonsense. Yet many of the thousands of people who shared it thought they were on the site of ABC News (abcnews.com). Instead, they were taken to a crafty look-alike site, abcnews.com.co. So, it’s never a bad idea to take a quick look at the URL.

Figure 2.4 Fake news from the look-alike website abcnews.com.co

On the other hand, the imperative to “examine the URL” gets us into trouble when we think we can get away with judging a site’s credibility by glancing at the three letters of the top-level domain (e.g., .com, .org, .edu, .mil, .gov, .net). One of the most entrenched beliefs we’ve run into is the idea that dot-org sites are inherently more trustworthy than dot-coms. The reasoning goes something like this: Dot-orgs are nonprofit organizations that serve the common good. Dot-coms, on the other hand, are just out to make a buck.

Perhaps you’ve heard that dot-orgs go through a special approval process before getting to display those three letters. Lots of people—half of all Americans and higher percentages in France, India, and Brazil, according to one survey—believed that an organization had to “meet criteria” to register a dot-org URL.[9] The authors report that universities including Penn State, Boston College and Harvard taught students that dot-orgs are synonymous with nonprofit, “tax exempt” organizations, a designation granted by the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS).[10]

We have some news.

Want to have your own dot-org site? Like right now? For yourself? Heck, even for your goldfish? You (and they) can! In the authors’ example, registering my-goldfish-are-the-bomb.org takes about five minutes and about fifteen dollars. The process will not verify whether you are a nonprofit. It will not verify whether you act on behalf of the public good. It will not verify whether you are a person or a goldfish. It will verify whether you (a) have an email address, and (b) have fifteen dollars.

Mind you, thousands of legitimate, socially beneficial groups carry the dot-org domain—the Red Cross, American Association of Retired People, Save the Children, the National Geographic Society, and many, many others. But so do lobbyists, political action committees, and front groups for corporate interests. Hate groups too. Stormfront.org, a notorious neo-Nazi site, proudly displays the dot-org flag. The authors report that 49 percent of organizations designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center carried the dot-org domain.[11]