Comment by tokenadult

This is a very important topic to discuss here on Hacker News. I'll put it out there, as a person who had a different educational background and profile of activities in my teen years from most hackers, that most hackers have remarkably poor preparation in evaluating sources and figuring out which sources are reliable sources.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4083766

"Added value in PhysOrg article: zero.

"Please, everyone, stop submitting links from PhysOrg and ScienceDaily. I have never ever ever seen anything on those sites that isn't either (1) bullshit or (2) a recycled press release with zero (or often negative) added value. (Sometimes it's both at once.) It only takes ten seconds' googling to find the original source."

To sum up, yes, as the interesting original blog post kindly submitted here points out, it is EASY to fool online news sites. And it is easy to fool whole groups of bloggers, and thus to fool news aggregation sites. Read a source carefully before submitting. Don't submit at all if the source is dodgy. Save the submissions and the upvotes and the comments for reliable sources that take care to verify factual statements.