Can fact-checking evolve to help the 2020 election?
The presidential election debates are ahead of us. Fact checkers around the world are sharpening their digital pencils to review all sorts of claims coming from the candidates. Yet, fact-checking has largely made little impact on elections. Without reform, it will let us down again in 2020.
“Mistruths”, “untruths”, and straight lies appear as pervasive as ever. Fact checking seems to have only muddied the political debate rather than provide a conversational foundation off of which to have real discussions. A new site, Metafact, offers a promising new model that could help.
Fact checkers associated with partisan organizations or seemingly biased institutions will always fall short of their aims. Gallup’s analysis of how people read news illustrates that people’s perception of information is heavily colored by their assumption of that source’s partisan bias. So even if Fox News and the Washington Post produced the same fact check depending on the viewer’s perception of these two organizations the same fact check would be interpreted differently.
Metafact offers an improvement to the fact-checking model in three key ways:
- it’s unaffiliated to any sort of outwardly or perceived partisan organization,
- it recognizes the nuance around establishing anything as a “fact”, and
- it features analysis from actual experts rather than highly informed observers.
Metafact has no ties to skewed or outwardly partisan organizations. What’s more, the people assessing the claims in question are independent from the organization. This setup means that people of all partisan stripes can come to the same conclusion after reading a metafact.io report.
Labelling something ‘Pants on Fire’ doesn’t help
Metafact provides readers with a more nuanced explanation of the issues than current fact checkers like PolitiFact, which offer ranges of veracity. But with labels such as “Pants on Fire!” these ranges introduce a degree of silliness into situations that merit serious analysis.
Metafact will give you a percentage breakdown of how numerous relevant experts think about an issue. For example, if you went to metafact.io today, you’d see that of 40 verified experts, 78 percent agree that routine mammograms save lives; all of the experts provide thorough explanations for their response. It follows that readers can check a claim and walk away with a real understanding of what’s regarded as certain and what’s still up in the air. This nuanced evaluation promises to improve conversations and challenge people of all affiliations to recognize that not everything is black and white and sortable into blue and red.
Experts only
The usefulness of fact checks hinges on the credibility of evaluators. Current fact checking organizations in general rely on practitioners more so than experts. These practitioners are equipped to consult experts in their assessment of a claim but, like a game of telephone, that introduces room for misinterpretation and imprecision. Metafact opts to instead go straight to the source — the doctors, scientists, academics and researchers themselves. The 40 experts that responded to that mammogram question included representatives from highly-regarded research institutions such as the Oregon Health & Science University and Harvard University. By eliminating the middle person, Metafact removes a barrier to establishing a stable foundation for conversation. The people analyzing issues on metafact.io have been verified as sufficiently knowledgeable based on their academic credentials and research.
Is it a model for politics?
There are limits to Metafact’s model. It presently focuses on questions of science, math, and health; these are questions that tend to lend themselves to peer review and robust empirical analysis. Political questions rarely accommodate such a methodical, precise review. Skeptics of metafact.io may also question whether the so-called “experts” truly offer nonpartisan thinking. Many of these experts likely attended or work for organizations and institutions that some would regard as liberal. Thankfully, though, as the site’s popularity grows, it will attract credible reviews from even more experts from all sorts of institutions and backgrounds; this means that the site’s reliability should only improve with time.
The “truth” is elusive. Fact checking will only bring us closer to factual understandings of complex issues if reviews are nonpartisan, nuanced, and numerous. metafact.io presents a promising model for the future of fact checking. Let’s hope the political world catches on…and quick.
