I strongly disagree with your thesis, but I thought you highlighted a very interesting feature of internet speech in your third paragraph. As you say, we are used to publication lending some degree of authority to speech. On the internet, this is clearly not true, but old habits die hard. I think this would be an excellent topic for a paper. One may see the same fallacy in many of the law articles published today: other articles are cited as proof of claims, but these articles are themselves fanciful creations that may or may not have any empirical evidence behind them. A similar phenomena is Fox News style circular reporting: news reports on unresearched claims made by others, which are then used as evidence that the original claim is true.

-- TheodoreSmith - 4 Jan 2009