On Fact Checking In An Age of Fake News
Did you know that 78% of news posted on Facebook is fake?*
O RLY?
*Just kidding. I made that up. But you didn’t double-check that, did you?
As an academic researcher, not only is my aim uncovering the most un-subjective version of the truth, but academic researchers are also judged heavily by peers on the rigour, rationality, and replicability of anything we publish. We have to be rigorous in making sure our research is based on reliable facts.
In fact, the process of researching facts is so drilled into us, that this epidemic of fake news is just plain depressing.
The Globe and Mail journalist Timothy Caulfield writes, “More and more entities – including governments, universities and professional organizations – are recognizing the importance of this issue. This year, the World Health Organization declared the spread of vaccine misinformation one of the top threats to public health.”
How big of a problem is Fake News? Hunt Allcott and Matthew Gentzkow estimate that the average American was exposed to between one and three articles from a ‘known’ fake news outlet before the 2016 presidential election. Potentially changing the course of history. Mr. Caulfield asks, as we welcome the 2020s, what we can do to move beyond the ‘post-truth’ decade that was the 2010s. Can science and truth rise above the noise?
In this mess of misinformation, how can we explain what’s going on here?
Facts Are Not Enough
… To Get Attention
In the age of social media, success of ‘news’ has little to do with it being true. To get a social media post boosted, you either need it to be outrageous enough to get attention, or hire social media bots (technology that can communicate on social media - often with the goal of swaying the conversation) to boost ‘likes’.
How does reading fake news impact how we respond to it? It’s not a happy answer. Recent research has found that simple exposure to misinformation increases our likelihood of spreading it. For example, a 2019 study by Daniel Effron and Medha Raj showed participants from a range of political affiliations fake news headlines. After they had seen the fake news headlines multiple times, they showed an increased willingness to share the headlines, compared to the novel headlines that they were exposed to. The participants also thought it would be less unethical to re-publish the headlines they saw multiple times, despite the fact that participants found both the new and old headlines equally accurate (or, rather, equally unbelievable).
Why did simply exposing participants to headlines multiple times increase the spreading of fake news? It’s because of a concept called processing fluency. Information we’ve seen before feels more fluent – meaning, easier to process. This ease of processing in our minds “gives it a ring of truthfulness”. This is known as the Illusory Truth Effect.
And guess what… fake news goes viral more than the truth. Authors Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral looked at rumour cascades on Twitter and found that not only were 126,000 rumours spread by over 3 million Twitter users, but fake news tended to spread to between 1,000 to 100,000 people, whereas truthful posts only spread to around 1,000 people. The difference between fake news and rumours? The authors believe that the degree of salaciousness of the fake news – its novelty and the reader’s emotional reaction (known as Emotional Reasoning, which is a very powerful force) – may be to blame.
Bottom line: the truth is not enough in and of itself to get readers attention. Frequency and the ability to trigger an emotional reaction from the reader is what does the trick.
… To Change Peoples’ Minds
Textbook confirmation bias.
We like information that is in tune with our existing beliefs. It helps us to make sense of and feel we have control over our world.
With sooooo many sources of information, we now have the choice to tune into whichever channels we want. This known as Confirmation Bias, seeking out information that supports our existing beliefs. Not only do we seek out information aligned with our beliefs, information that is counter to these beliefs is more easily discredited or ignored. Oh I don’t believe what the government is saying about climate change because they are probably just trying to trick us into giving more money to taxes. (Please note: that was just an example of someone discrediting a new fact).
Moreover, scholar Steven Sloman, a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University, asks – do people even care about news being fake? Propagating fake facts could actually be a signal of group membership to a community or an identity. Think of superstitions. For example, a tradition in Japan is to tuck in your thumbs while in a cemetery. This originates from the Japanese word for "thumb" directly translating to "parent finger,” and tucking in this finger protects your parents from death. PROBABLY FAKE NEWS, and likely not all Japanese people believe this to be true; however, doing so signals group membership and respecting traditions and they might continue this superstition to show they belong to that group.
… To Think Twice About Responding
Although politicians have used misinformation to their advantage and to sway political outcomes since the dawn of time, never before has technology allowed us (read: incentivized us) to react and respond in real time. The consequence of this is a disincentive to fact check – or even read carefully – what has already been said or our own response.
President-in-Tweet
The “President-in-Tweet” sent out 797 tweets in September, and over 11,000 tweets since he took office. Do you think he’s taken the time for those messages of authority to be thoughtfully crafted or researched? (Fun fact, the fact-checking organization Politifact estimates only 16% of his statements as being ‘true’ or ‘mostly true’).
Let’s just hope he doesn’t find out about Snapchat.
There is a way to predict who is able to distinguish between fake news and real news. The Cognitive Reflection Test measures the ability to think analytically. This means two things: 1. We are more vulnerable to fake news when we react and respond with our gut rather than our logical faculties; and, b) the identification of misinformation is a skill. (Hoping that my use of 1., b) caused you to engage your brain a bit there).
Want to try the Cognitive Reflection Test yourself? Try answering these without help and see how well you do:
A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take
100 machines to make 100 widgets?In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size.
If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it
take for the patch to cover half of the lake?
Even the smartest among us fall victim to Fake News. Stanford University Sam Wineburg developed an experiment where participants look at websites and determine if the content was true or fake. Here is an example that describes a tenured professor participating in the experiment:
“On his screen was an article published by a group called the American College of Pediatricians that discussed how to handle bullying in schools. Among the advice it offered: schools shouldn’t highlight particular groups targeted by bullying because doing so might call attention to “temporarily confused adolescents.”
Scanning the site, the professor took note of the “.org” web address and a list of academic-looking citations. The site’s sober design, devoid of flashy, autoplaying videos, lent it credibility.”
Participants – including tenured professors – have mistaken this example website for truth. The participants were actually looking at a ‘hate group’, splinter faction that broke in 2002 from the mainstream American Academy of Pediatrics, a group that is vehemently against same-sex adoption. The participants (including the tenured prof in the example) were too focused on the superficial features of the page to actually evaluate the content and the group writing it.
But this guy is a professor. He is REALLY smart. How could he get it wrong?
Maybe it comes down to the way we all Think.
Our prevailing view of cognitive processing espouses two primary ways of thinking that have popularly come to be referred to as System 1 and System 2 thanks to Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s masterpiece, Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 1 is intuitive, reactionary, and comprises most of our thoughts throughout our day. How else would we make it through? Dodging oncoming pedestrians on the street, tying your shoe, swatting away a fly... It’s easy and automatic. On the other hand, System 2 is effortful. It is reserved for more complex thinking operations, like arithmetic. It represents a different process happening in your brain – in which you likely had to retrieve information in your memory and implement it to make a decision, computation, or reach a conclusion.
When the prof in the above example looked at the site, he was using his System 1, automatic skills. Quick glances at the way the site looks, the web address, etc., it checked all the boxes. He didn’t really look at the content. He was swayed by the inconsequential stuff. And that’s how he got fooled.
The good news (or the bad news) is that we are all equally gullible and vulnerable to fake news. Wineburg’s team found that people of all ages, IQs, and levels of digital savviness fall short of asking important questions (System 2) about the stuff they read on the internet (relying on gut and intuition alone – System 1).
Indeed, Gordon Pennycook and David Rand’s study on why people believe blatantly false news headlines has found that it’s predominantly because people fail to think – NOT because they are motivated to believe certain facts (i.e. like how republicans would be motivated to believe Trump is innocent in this impeachment debacle). What does this mean? No matter what your original beliefs, we are all potential victims of fake information. We’ll all in it together.
Where Do We Go From Here?
The consequences of Fake News are serious. Fake news can lead people to do crazy things, like in India, where false rumours about child kidnappings spread on WhatsApp prompted mobs to beat innocent people to death. In Nigeria, violent images were planted to incite racial tensions and violence in retaliation, leading to a number of deaths - even though the images were not from Nigeria. Even though the spread of fake news and our distrust in the media might be the reason why we are relying more on our intuition rather than our logical sense as the measure of truth for online content, critical thinking is the self-inoculation against false beliefs.
According to Timothy Caulfield’s article in the Globe and Mail, you can arm yourself against the propagation of political falsities in the following ways:
Correct Misinformation
Despite the conformation bias, there is evidence to suggest that correcting misinformation can still make a difference. Caulfield cites the following scientific research: “A 2015 study, for example, found that emphasizing the strength and breadth of the scientific consensus on a topic is an effective strategy, perhaps because this helps to correct perceptions of false balance (that is, the perception that the evidence on either side of an issue is more balanced or contested than it actually is). A 2019 study found that not responding publicly to science deniers on topics such as vaccination can have a negative effect on public beliefs and actions.” The message? Speaking up can still make a difference.
Harness the Power of a good story
We are very much predisposed to learn through stories and narrative. That’s one thing fake news has on science; let me tell you, after reading hundreds of academic journal articles all I can say is that they are a bit dry. And even though anecdotes are not science, they can still be convincing. Here are a couple examples of fake stories that we totally believe:
The Great Wall of China is SO GREAT you can see it from space. False!
Bats are blind. False! Bats not only can see, they can use echolocation.
If you swim after eating, you’ll drown. False! Eating doesn’t increase risk of cramps from swimming. (Although swimming under the influence of alcohol does increase the risks for obvious reasons…)
But aren’t all those little fake factoids awesome? Let’s harness the power of a good story to enhance the spread of the truth.
Here are 52 fake stories we all believe (I wonder how many of these started out as a lie a parent told their kid?)
Preach and Teach Critical Thinking
We all have the capacity to develop skills of critical thinking. Let’s encourage ourselves and others to work on and use those skills to stop the propagation of misinformation. Research has assured us that most sharing of fake news isn’t done from a place of malevolence, but instead it’s because we’re all just so darn busy and overwhelmed to take pause and think about if it’s true. Caulfield cites a study that found even a simple reminder to consumers of media about the concept of accuracy boosted the quality of news shared. I enjoy the below cartoon because there is something satisfying about the idea of turning your BS sense into a game.
Critical thinking… try it next time you’re on Facebook
Happy reading, fake-news detectives!
Love,
