The dangers of pulling misinformation off the Internet and using it in a public venue surfaced Tuesday at the regular monthly meeting of the Floyd County Board of Supervisors.

A county resident who spoke during the public comment period presented the supervisors with a printout from a web site that she said proved that the CEO of Nordex, the company proposing a wind generator farm in Floyd County, had ties to organized crime in Europe.

Nice story but the printout came from an anti-Semitic web site and was based on a report about a Ukranian mob boss — who is Jewish — who controls a Russian company called “Nordex.”

The “Nordex” cited in the article is not “Nordex SE,” the company that controls “Nordex USA,” developer of wind generator farms.  Someone else emailed me the same link early in the wind generator debate and I checked it out.  There are 52 companies named “Nordex” in the world.  Only five are connected in the “Nordex” network of companies that includes “Nordex SE” and not one of those five has any connection with the “Nordex” controlled by the Russian mob.

This is a problem when people take unsubstantiated information from the Internet and pass it off as fact. Spreading such misinformation is both wrong and libelous and bringing more misinformation into a debate that is already muddled with too much misinformation and emotion is a disservice to the public and county government.