How Credible Are Links in the Online Content You’re Reading?

On July 2, 2012, The Huffington Post published an article under the headline “Burger King Supports LGBT Rights With ‘Proud Whopper’ And ‘Be Your Way’ Campaign.” The article contains 10 links to internal and external sources — a lot of links for a relatively short piece. But no matter whether a piece of content has two or 10 links, a reader must consider the weight that each link carries.

Overall, the cited sources in The Huffington Post article are relatively credible, based on guidelines set out in Criteria to Evaluate the Credibility of WWW Resources. In fact, four of the cited sources are The Huffington Post itself; as an established website, The Huffington Post is a credible source of information, although some readers may consider it “liberal” and “biased,” based in part on the political leanings of its founder, Arianna Huffington.

Meanwhile, three of the links go to websites for nonprofit LGBT organizations — one organization in San Francisco and the other in Seattle. According to the credibility criteria, these websites qualify as “special interest” sites; of course, these sites promote the positions of the organizations, but that should come as no surprise to the reader. Another link leads to a page on the website of the nonprofit Burger King McLamore Foundation about the group’s scholars program; again, this site promotes the organization and, as such, is biased.

The remaining two links connect to social media websites; one link goes to Burger King’s YouTube page and the other to a Yelp review of a Burger King restaurant in San Francisco. While these are credible sources, a reader must keep in mind that the sites are biased, as both are promotional in nature.

The Burger King article on The Huffington Post stands out as an example of how tethered online content is to other online content in this era of unrestricted publishing through mass media, whether a content link directs a reader to a news website, a business website, a personal blog or a social media network. Because we have woven such a complicated web of interlinked content, the modern-day reader must be cautious about taking linked content at face value. The linking of a blog post or article to another piece of online content should not be viewed as a tacit endorsement of the validity of that linked content; the reader should judge each piece of linked content on its own merits.