Online Forum

My son wanted to make Martin Luther King Junior part of his GCSE coursework. He knew there’d be a lot of information on the web about Dr. King and he discovered one which looked like the official website. But it turned out that it had been written by a bunch of racists that were trying to rewrite history. I couldn’t believe it when he showed it to me!
There must me some way of telling whether websites are legitimate.
Should I check everything that he reads on the web?
Isn’t this illegal?
Should I tell my school about this site?

We do something called a reverse lookup using a search engine, by typing link: and then the full web address of the site you’re checking. That tells us what other sites link to it and then we make a judgement from that.
I also check what advertising the site carries. I get suspicious of inappropriate ads on sites.
I usually stick to well-known educational sites and CD-ROMs for the twins.

I think one of the biggest problems in this area is that children are very likely to believe everything they read on the Internet.
But it is very easy for people to put their views or opinions on a website, much easier than getting them published in a book or magazine. The net’s not a teacher or other trusted individual, so you have to research as much as possible to get balanced and reliable information.
Children need to learn to question everything they read online. We always try to check information with other sites or sources to make sure we’re not being duped.

You would think that something like this would be illegal. But it’s hard to ban free speech and personal opinion.
So because anything can be published online the first thing we always check on a website is the “About us” or “Background” page to see who the publisher is, what their credentials are, and what the site’s trying to achieve.
If I’m not happy that we can contact the sites publishers; if there’s no “About us” page, or there are no reliable contact details, we don’t chose it.