Fact-check like a pro
Today is International Fact-Checking Day. Seriously. It’s a commemoration almost as important as Human Rights Day (Dec. 10) and definitely more crucial than International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sept. 19). Its organizers have put together a website (factcheckingday.com) that offers lesson plans, trivia quizzes, and guides to help all of us hone our fact-checking skills.
Two years ago, we probably would not have seen the need for a day like this. But developments since then have shown that people will believe a lot of bunk. For example, in March 2016, Corey Lewandowski, who was then Donald Trump’s campaign manager, and the American conservative commentator Ann Coulter tweeted a link to a story about a person who admitted he had been paid $3,500 to join an anti-Trump protest. That link gained a lot of traction. Seven months later, it was still being shared by the likes of Eric Trump.
That link led to a lie. Paul Horner told The Washington Post’s Caitlin Dewey in November 2016 that he had made the post up because he wanted “to make fun of that insane belief” among many of Trump’s supporters that protesters were being paid to show up in anti-Trump rallies.
“I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots,” Horner told the Post. “But Trump supporters, they just keep running with it. They never factcheck anything.”
When more people began to gain access to the internet in the mid-1990s, the optimistic view was that it would usher in an era of broader and more in-depth information. That it would allow people to build better things or solve problems more creatively, because the storehouses of the world’s knowledge would now be open to us. We can browse part of the collections of libraries halfway across the world and correspond by email with experts.
That happened for some, but connectivity also meant that anyone with access and time on their hands now had the power to push their own views. Not all of it was important or even accurate. Sometimes it was merely gullibility that made people share what we now know as “fake news.”
But others soon found there was money to be made from deliberately spreading false content. Horner, for instance, makes a living off fake news sites, but he calls them satire. He’s not the only one. In November 2016, Buzzfeed reported that it had traced more than 100 active websites on US politics to the town of Veles (population: 45,000) in Macedonia. It turned out that for some of its young residents, a quick way to make money was to push “sensationalist and often false content” on Facebook, in the hope that people (in that case, Trump supporters) would go to their sites and help them earn more from advertising.
Much of this is not new. Propaganda has existed for nearly four centuries, and there have probably been gullible people for as long as humans have existed. But what makes this age of “post-truth” and “alternative facts” different are speed and scale. Social media has made the practice of propaganda more democratic; lies and half-truths travel just as fast as the facts.
The standard advice is to check the source before sharing any story on social media. That’s good advice, but there’s recent information that casts it in a new light.
A study that the American Press Institute reported about two weeks ago relied on an experiment to figure out how people decide what stories they’ll believe on social media. Among its findings was that people were more inclined to believe something if they trusted the person who had shared it. It was a more influential variable than who had actually written the material.
If you have any amount of influence at all (if people other than your parents or children trust you, for instance), choose carefully what you’ll share on social media. Is it useful? Who’s its source? Are their methods transparent and trustworthy? How much of what you share confirms your opinions and beliefs, and how much challenges them?