Pope Francis, on January 9 speaking to the members of the Diplomatic Corps accredited to the Holy See, raised the issue of fake news. “We see increasingly polarised societies, marked by a general sense of fear and distrust of others and of the future, which is aggravated by the continuous creation and spread of fake news. This phenomenon generates false images of reality and a climate of suspicion that foments hate, undermines people’s sense of security, and compromises civil coexistence and the stability of entire nations.”
This came only a few days after Mark Zuckerberg – the owner and creator of Facebook – announced to much wailing and gnashing of teeth that Facebook (Meta) was going to phase out use of ‘fact-checkers’ to be replaced by ‘community notes’, an approach to online clarification of information that seems to have been borrowed from X (formerly Twitter).
US President Joe Biden denounced the decision as ‘really shameful’. “I think it’s really shameful,” Mr Biden told reporters at the White House when asked about the announcement. “Telling the truth matters,” he said, adding that the move was “completely contrary to everything America’s about.”
Aghast
Fact-checking organisations were equally aghast at the move. The International Fact-Checking Network has warned: “If Meta decides to stop the program worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places.” This assertion could be true but is obviously difficult to subject to fact-checking. What is factual is that members of this network are dependent on the survival of the fact-checking industry for their own business.
Within the response to Zuckerberg’s announcement are two relevant areas. Many (I believe correctly) view this as an appeasement of the incoming Trump administration. It stretches credibility that the timing of the announcement is anything else. But that is not to say that Zuckerberg’s reasoning is not without merit.
Fact-checking has always – if nothing else – bemused me. It offers ‘fact-checkers’ a position of non-partisan, near omnipotent arbiters in the cultural/social/political debates that are usually less about clear facts but arguments and positions that get worked through in the rag and bone shop of the heart. Many claims are neither resolvable nor a debate around facts per se. Journalism in itself is a fact-checking exercise where the credibility of a news source was dependent on rigour and accuracy.
A survey of 150 participants by the Harvard Misinformation Review founds that ‘experts’ leaned strongly toward the left of the political spectrum”
Social media has challenged the dominant position of journalism in establishing the ‘truth’ that reaches the public domain. The deluge of noise and information (disinformation/misinformation/fake-news) that the public is subjected to – and partaking in creating – creates a new paradigm of truth determination. Community notes provide a partial means of self-correction within the ecosystem but are not a panacea.
Fact-checkers themselves tend to be neither partisan nor omnipotent. A survey of 150 participants by the Harvard Misinformation Review founds that ‘experts’ leaned strongly toward the left of the political spectrum: “very right-wing (0), fairly right-wing (0), slightly right-of-centre (7), centre (15), slightly left-of-centre (43), fairly left-wing (62), very left-wing (21)”.
Biases
The assumption that fact-checking leads to the ‘truth’ assumes that fact-checkers are aware of and able to park their biases when they are interpreting the factual accuracy of information that is being shared online. Ironically, it is people with the same leanings who trumpet the need for individuals to check their biases in order to live their lives as better people. Implicit in this is that acknowledging biases is for other people rather than the enlightened.
President Biden’s claim that ‘Telling the truth matters’ is factually correct. All reasonable people would agree. But taking a fact-checking approach to this statement would raise the issue that ‘fact-checking’ and ‘truth-telling’ are not the same thing nor does that latter lead to the former.
The claim “90% of babies with Down Syndrome aborted” was deemed false by a prominent fact-checking group, The rationale”
In Ireland ‘fact-checking’ and responding to asserted ‘dis/misinformation’ has been used – even weaponised – repeatedly to establish points of fact in the cultural and political sphere. During the 2016 abortion referendum, the No side was subject to significant scrutiny in its claims, many of which rejected (not refuted) in a manner that could best be described as Jesuitical. One example: the claim “90% of babies with Down Syndrome aborted” was deemed false by a prominent fact-checking group, The rationale.
There were 1,232 pre-birth Down Syndrome diagnoses in 2013. 75% (925) ended in termination; 6.7% (82) ended in live birth; 1.6% (20) ended in foetal death; the outcome was unknown in 16.6% of cases (205). Of the cases whose outcome was known, 90% ended in termination … the fact that the 90% figure refers only to known outcomes – where there is a prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome, rather than all outcomes, the claim is FALSE. The leaflet did not contain the context that 90% is the figure in the case where a prenatal diagnosis of Down Syndrome has been made.
Impact
Given the scale of the vote to repeal the 8th amendment, it is unlikely fact checking made a definitive difference in the result but the cumulative impact of repeated downplaying the No side concerns and points of issue is bound to have an impact that is impossible to quantify.
More recently, fact-checking was deployed in the debate around the SPHE curriculum where claims made by whistleblowers were ‘debunked’ based solely on responses from the government about what would happen in the future and the content of the claims subject to little rigour before being dismissed.
Fact-checking – ignored or reviled by some and treated as ‘gospel’ by others – lacks a fundamental requirement of good journalism. It is essentially a paper based exercise where pre-existing information is used to formulate decisions, which can – and often are- cherry picked – without a substantive investigation into the issues themselves. At best it relies on other journalists and an assumption of factual accuracy at some point in an analysis. It is not truth determining in itself but reliant on someone else’s ‘truth’ at some point in the ‘check’.
Social media also creates virtual self-selecting communities where people are subject predominantly to views that align with their own”
Misinformation and disinformation – if you can differentiate the two – are a problem on social media but they are a symptom rather than the cause. Social media allows for innumerable ‘facts’ to be shared, creating an information system that is impossible for every individual to filter through.
Social media also creates virtual self-selecting communities where people are subject predominantly to views that align with their own and often not subject to counter arguments that allow for an ‘opinion of facts’ to be formed. Fact-checking, rather than addressing this challenge, tends to add to it. It generates more heat than shedding light.
These virtual communities are increasingly replacing real communities where people meet and discuss in the physical world, where you cannot self-select whose views you hear and whose you don’t. The nature of civic discourse has become so fraught and polarised – uncivic – that the more and more people are choosing to shelter in self-selecting communities and avoiding or refusing to share their views amongst flesh-and-bone communities for fear of ostracisation in real-life situations reflective of how cancel-culture operates in the virtual space.