Fact-checking: who decides what to believe?

Most recently, Google launched a fact-checking program for its services. A similar feature has already been added to Amazon Alexa.

Google believes that the “fact-finding” results will help people make sounder judgments and form a reasoned opinion in an environment where thousands of articles are published per minute.

However, in the release tactfully omitted the question, what is this 115 "fact checking organizations"? Who will now decide what we consider to be true, and what - fiction? Who will check them?
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Fact check from google

The organization that provides Google and Amazon fact-checking service is Duke Reporters' Lab . This is a company established on the basis of the Duke University , since 2013 its head is Bill Adair.

Bill Adair co-authored and edited the PolitiFact local fact-checking site . In 2009, the site won the Pulitzer Prize for covering the 2008 presidential election. The site publishes political news, collected from various sources, with ratings on a six-point scale, from Pravda (True) to Lying Completely! (Pants on fire!)

In 2013, the Knight Foundation proposed to Bill Adyru to replace Sarah Cohen at the professor’s place at Duke University, which was paid for by the Foundation. Bill Adair also replaced Sarah Cohen as head of the Duke Reporters' Lab, a platform for online discussion of innovations in journalism, as they call her at the university.

Among colleagues, Bill Adheira is called the “digital era journalist.” He was an active supporter of electronic journalism tools and an ideologist in the development of the " Settle It! PolitiFact's Argument Ender " fact-checking iOS application.

Bill Adair intends to spread his experience with fact-checking at PolitiFacts to many other organizations. Duke Reporters' Lab maintains a database of fact-checking sites, currently including 115 sites worldwide. The database includes sites without a pronounced political position, regularly publishing evaluation materials about the veracity or falsity of statements by news agencies, journalists, politicians and other public figures.

Criteria for inclusion in the database:

• The site should consider the facts from all parties and parties involved.
• Examine each individual statement and arrive at a common conclusion.
• Follow up on campaign promises
• Disclose sources and methods of research
• Disclose sources of financing and counterparties
• Set the spread of truthful information above other goals.

The database is not allowed sites associated with political parties or government agencies.

To understand whether we can trust these organizations, you need to understand their method.

What is a "fact check"

Fact checking is a discipline recently separated from journalism. Its most famous representatives are PolitiFacts and FactCheck.org . Verification of the facts involves breaking the source material into a list of single facts, checking each fact for reliability, accuracy, and general truthfulness, after which a verdict is given to the source material: reliably or not. Estimates of the activities of such sites, in general, are positive. However, in the community of journalists there are serious contradictions on the issue of the principle of checking facts.

A group of journalists Wall Street Journal believes that monosyllabic value judgments prevent readers from delving into the text of articles and theses of politicians. Instead of self-assessing each individual statement, readers apply a monosyllabic assessment to the entire article. For example, if an article is rated as “Almost True”, readers miss a specific inaccurate moment in the article, regarding each proposed fact as “almost true.”

The Time employee believes that the rating system proposed by PolitiFact is not flexible enough. It is necessary in a special way to mark facts and judgments that cannot be confirmed or refuted, honest errors and occasional irresponsible statements. Otherwise, PolitiFact comes in defiance of its goal: it creates a deliberately false impression.

In addition, the principles of fact-checking are criticized for evaluating only the proposed facts, but not the principle and the emotional tint of their presentation. From this point of view, someone can represent a small achievement as a tremendous one, and successfully pass the test - after all, an achievement is.

Many articles and statements can not be unambiguously assessed as true or false. For example, if we are talking about quantitative estimates. In such cases, it is important that the author was mistaken to a greater or lesser degree, and both options may carry a different context.

A separate direction for criticism is the commercial basis of organizations providing the fact-checking service. Like traditional media, such organizations are dependent on advertisers and other investors. They may, to some extent, affect the estimates, thereby attracting additional users or carrying out a commercial order.

Do not forget that in fact-finding organizations exactly the same journalists work as in ordinary media. This problem is described in the Latin phrase: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes” - “Who will steer clear of the watchmen themselves?”. When creating controlling organizations, it is customary for the “watchman” to be fundamentally different from those whom they must control. Formation, goals, social stratum, position in the hierarchy of public service. In the case of fact-checking, organizations consist of exactly the same people, with the same education, goals, and connections as ordinary journalists. According to 62% of American voters , they are ordinary journalists, and do not deserve additional privileges for the words “fact checking” in statements.

Fact checking and journalism

The media space is choked up by an incredible amount of exposed forgeries, manipulations, misinformations and outright lies, presented to the media as news. This ensured public demand for fact-checking organizations. As you know, demand creates supply. Even in Google and Amazon did not stand, decided to use fact-checking as a competitive advantage. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Russia has also opened its fact-checking service.

However, media space trends are changing rapidly. Will fact checks be equally in demand in a year? In five years? To understand, you need to understand how the fact-finding in journalism should work, how it works now, and why it works that way.

To establish that a certain event has taken place, the journalist must receive two independent confirmations of the event. It is desirable that these were heterogeneous confirmation. For example, an oral story and a fragment of a video.

After receiving two confirmations, the journalist should check the sources. This process is a small journalistic investigation. It is necessary to establish that the source had the opportunity to receive the information that he provided, and did not have a direct connection with the second source. To do this, the journalist begins his own research of the issue, requests the internal regulations of the organizations in which the sources work, uses cartographic services and public sources of photographs to confirm the actual state of affairs in the locality. In general, performs the traditional operational work.

Only after the journalist has become convinced of the independence of the sources and the actual possibility of each of the sources receiving the information transmitted - can he publish the data obtained.

With the rapid development of social networks, traditional media began to compete with public opinion leaders, bloggers. For an ordinary person, the fact expressed by the blogger is just as important as information from traditional media. At the same time, bloggers are not bound by journalistic ethics and professional norms; they can afford to publish information faster and more often than professional editors. To withstand the competition, the media began to gradually reduce the level of verification. As a result, they fell on the same level with competitors.

Fact-finding organizations should address this problem by bringing journalism back to its previous level through its services. But now, none of these organizations do traditional journalistic checks on two independent confirmations and source analysis. They do exactly what is written in the title - they check only the facts for truth and falsity.

In its present form, the verification of facts does not solve the task and is a dead end branch of journalism. The principle of verifying facts does not carry a more effective method than journalistic verification. Over time, publishers will learn to manipulate the facts so that the articles pass Fact Checking with the desired result.

How to live now?

The only possible solution is to learn how to conduct a journalistic check yourself. This is a task similar to identifying cognitive distortions .

First of all, you need to find the primary source of information. Even if the article states, “according to the information of an anonymous source,” details of this anonymous source should still be indicated, making it possible to understand that he could have access to the stated facts. If the source is not specified at all, googling works fairly well on the key material theses. If it is impossible to find the primary source, you are faced with a fake or unfair journalistic work, which is equally bad.

Next, you need to use common sense and think about the conditions under which the indicated data could come from the indicated source. Recently, a popular way of cheating is to show a piece of wood or a piece of metal with traces of explosions or shots, and then declare that it was someone who shot and blew it. The only way to get such a conclusion is to conduct two independent examinations in a blind way . If the data on the expertise is not provided, then you have a fake-based mind manipulation.

Each fact has its own history, its own method of examination and relevant requirements for regulations and documents. Another traditional way of manipulation: to exclude from consideration certain documents, so that the rest allowed to put the fact in a certain light. For example, you can accidentally forget that in our country there is a law that gives certain rights to the president, who has stopped performing his duties, and to his family members. When reading or viewing, you need to ask, “do I know enough about the internal rules and regulations related to the phenomenon, are all the documents presented in the study?”

After you establish that the existence of information is fundamentally possible, and all the necessary documents and regulations are presented, you need to find references to at least two independent sources.

If you use the principle of journalistic verification for a long time, you can still at the stage of reading the heading and the first paragraph determine which evidence will be sufficient to recognize the material as reliable. You can quickly find them in the body of the article.

But what about “Fact Check” from Google

As I, I hope, showed in this article, the approach to verifying the facts of organizations, on the basis of the data of which the “plate” will be drawn, cannot be considered productive. The very existence of such an indication is a manipulation of consciousness. You can write a million times that the reader has the right to ignore the indication, but the brain is arranged in a certain way and is inclined to save energy. Therefore, the display will affect the consciousness of most readers, reducing the critical threshold of perception.

And, if in Alexa, the fact-checking function is activated upon a request, Google imposes on us a vision of the world created by a circle of commercial organizations. We can only strengthen our skepticism and teach children to think independently, critically perceive the news.

Instead of the Ministry of Truth, we will have the Truth Corporation. Be careful.

PS I thank KarasikovSergey for the original article and constructive discussion.