Dreading when Data is Unleashed.

For past 2 decades we have believed that web will free information, anyone can report it,  pass it on, take it down, etc. But there was always a nuclear outcome that seemed plausible but the optimists thought humans as a crowd will control its misuse. We are learning it is tricky:

Obama said, “If we are not serious about facts and what’s true and what’s not … if we can’t discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.”

"If everything seems to be the same and no distinctions are made, then we won’t know what to protect. We won’t know what to fight for. And we can lose so much of what we’ve gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we’ve come to take for granted,” he said. 

Now I have a mental exercise for folks. We are as a society trying to set Data free. Data (say tables, observations, measurements) can be presented, analyzed, depicted, mined in so many ways that there is true and what's not will (need to) be debated in web scale.