Using Facts, Not Fact-Checking, To Fight Fake News
I was recently on a bus where I encountered a woman of a type I hear about often but rarely see in real life. She was white, in her late 50s or so. She was using her smartphone to scroll through Twitter. She mostly followed “news” sources who I knew trafficked in dubious or outright false information.
But it was her behavior that interested me the most. She would click on an article, look at the headline, scroll through it faster than any human could actually read, and then share it. The amount of information that she consumed was minimal. But she was spreading information to everyone who followed her. This is the Typhoid Mary of fake news.
We know this happens. After the Las Vegas shooting in October, we saw fake news spreading on social media. The shooter was Muslim. The shooter was a Nancy Pelosi donor. Neither of those turned out to be true. But that didn’t stop the hoaxes from spreading.
This is not a new idea, of course. Mark Twain was famously quoted as saying that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can put its shoes on. (He never said that. The quote first appeared in 1919, nine years after his death.) “Factoid,” a word that now means a curious piece of trivia, was originally coined by Norman Mailer to mean a fake fact that was passed off as true. But social media, the internet, and our entire communications framework have sped up how fast these fake facts spread while diminishing the ability of traditional sources of information to correct the record.
We see it in my world of science journalism.
Although most Americans now concede that Global Warming is happening, most don’t think it will be a problem in their lifetimes. And according to Pew research, 4 in 10 Americans believe that humans have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.
This science illiteracy is a problem for an economy that is increasingly based on technology. It’s bad for a democracy that depends on people being able to separate fact from fiction. And as someone who works in science media, it simply pisses me off.
So what can be done? At Science Friday we cover a lot of issues that are controversial in the general public but are actually settled science: Things like climate change, vaccines, and GMOs. And we’ve had hundreds of experts over the years explaining these topics to our listeners. Similarly, there are outlets that produce well researched factual media that describe these issues. But they can’t compete with memes, clickbait-y articles that deny basic science, and social media posts that obfuscate legitimate science.
Clearly we can’t continue to do things like we’ve always done them and expect different results.
That’s why we’re working on something that we hope will be a solution. And we stumbled onto it because our fans asked us for help.
Starting next week we will launch a series of resources that we’re calling Science Facts. These resources offer short, shareable facts about scientific issues that are controversial in the general public but are settled for scientists.
These resources are not for the science deniers themselves, however. Our listeners have been asking us for years to help them talk with their friends and family who don’t “believe” in science. Our fans understood that things like man-made climate change were real and they believed it was happening. But they wanted to know how to talk with their friends and family who don’t get it.
Over the years we’ve dabbled in ways to address this problem. In early 2017 we did a segment on “How To Talk To A Climate Change Denier” and we summarized the experts’ findings as quote cards that our audience could share over social media. But they wanted more. They wanted actual facts to present. Science Friday is not an advocacy shop, and we don’t do commentary. But we do have 25 years worth of radio where people have talked about some of these issues.
So we decided to create some of these resources for our fans to help them have productive conversations. How do we help make the conversations productive?
We’re drawing on research that shows that friends and family are better at changing minds than media institutions. And we also know that repeating false claims simply serves to reinforce them. From our research we found that the key to helping have these conversations is to:
- Make sure not to repeat any falsehoods, even to debunk them
- Give people new information
- Present the information multiple times in multiple formats
We pitched the idea of creating these resources to the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri, and they thought it would be a good project. We worked with Mizzou journalism students to take the words of experts and turn them into social media-friendly content. Each of these resources is fact checked and accurate. But they’re also catchy, shareable, and designed to communicate a concept quickly.
So that’s what we’re working on. We’ll launch the first of these over social media on Tuesday, January 16. And we’ll be surveying our listeners to see what kinds of conversations these Science Facts spark.
I honestly don’t know if these facts will change the behavior of the fake news Typhoid Mary who I saw on the bus. But if she has a friend or family member who listens to Science Friday then maybe the next conversation they have about climate change will be productive and backed up by facts. If so, that’s good for the Earth, good for our democracy, and a good first step to combating fake news.
This article is based on a talk I gave at the University of Missouri School of Journalism as part of a fellowship from the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute.
