The 25th Block: Fact-checking checklist
Why is a story from 2018 making the rounds again?
Checklist for fact-checking
Two reputable newsletters I subscribed to told me this week that an 8-year-old girl pulled a 1,500-year-old sword – but this story is from 2018. So why is it news again? Why is there no context to why it’s making the rounds again? Does anyone check the dates of stories they read on the Internet? Yes, I will name the newsletters: The Download by MIT Technology Review and The Overspill by Charles Arthur.
Although this story is harmless, imagine if it’s a story about an infectious disease, spread out of the context of time and place. Imagine if it’s a story about protests or change of government.
So, here’s a checklist of what to do before sharing anything on the Internet:
Credentials: Who published it and are they reputable? This is why all the links I share have the names of the author and publisher.
Publishers should have an ‘About Us’ section and journalists a bio of their specialisation or background.
Check the language used in these sections for biases.
Check the URLs and logos as the greatest pretenders (whether playful parody or malicious malinformation) can mimic authentic publications almost to a tee.
Date: When was it published? Last year, The Guardian improved the way its old stories are labelled on its website and social media so that you can see a huge yellow banner that tells you the age of the story before you even click the link.
If it’s not current, is it relevant?
If it’s relevant, what is the purpose (of resharing)?
Sources: Does it cite reliable sources and does it link to the primary (original) source, such as a peer-reviewed paper?
Does the primary source disclose conflict(s) of interest?
If it’s a research, are the datasets made available and are the methodologies rigorous?
If it is a first-hand witness of an event, can this person provide evidence and did the journalist verify this information, for example, are the images altered or taken out of context?
People and Places: Is anyone else reporting it?
If not, why?
If yes, are they wording the same story differently?
Who is sharing it and where are they sharing it? Who is behind those accounts and what are their affiliations?
Also, if you’re not new here, you’ll notice that this week’s edition is a break in format because it has been quite a busy week for me. I start with the reflection section at the top and then below that, I share links of interest with pull quotes from the articles. Let me know if you prefer this format or if I should revert to the original format next week. (Ps. Regardless of your preference, moving forward, I will include a dollar sign next to links that are behind a paywall because I understand that can be frustrating.)
I prefer… this new format | the old format | neither, I’m indifferent
Cambridge game pre-bunks COVID-19 conspiracies
The folks behind the fake news game, Bad News, are back again with Go Viral! a game that “gives players a taste of the techniques and motivations behind the spread of coronavirus misinformation.”
Fred Lewsey for University of Cambridge:
It builds on research from Cambridge psychologists that found by giving people a taste of the techniques used to spread fake news on social media, it increases their ability to identify and disregard misinformation in the future.
Go Viral! launches as a new study from the team behind it is published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. The latest findings show that a single play of a similar game can reduce susceptibility to false information for at least three months.
Let me know how you did!
The woman who made modern journalism ($)
Liza Mundy for The Atlantic:
Back when modern journalism was defining itself—before objectivity was a reportorial byword, before off the record and on background were terms of the trade, and before narrative nonfiction was common parlance—one of the leading practitioners of the bold new form of inquiry was Ida Tarbell. A tall woman in a long dress, her brown hair piled high, she might be seen regularly entering the doors of the Standard Oil offices in New York City as the century began. Tarbell was meeting with what we would call a “source.” Her interlocutor was a forceful man with a nickname—Henry “Hell Hound” Rogers—right out of central casting. Tarbell was writing a series on Standard Oil and the rapacious practices of its founder, John D. Rockefeller. Rogers’s job was to guide her reporting—as we might say, to “spin” her.
But Tarbell was not to be spun. When he gave her a glass of milk, she insisted on paying. When he pressed to know who had told her something, she refused to say. When she ran some near-finished copy by him—what would today qualify as fact-checking—she refused to let him make changes beyond offering corrections. All of these were guidelines she developed alongside her editor, S. S. McClure, and her colleagues at his eponymous magazine, McClure’s. The upshot was one of the seminal early examples of what is now known as long-form investigative reporting.
The line that struck me was in the concluding paragraph: “The tension she felt between advocacy and objectivity—like the journalistic techniques she helped establish—is no less central today than it was then.”
Facebook seeks shutdown of NYU research project into political ad targeting ($)
Jeff Horwitz for the Wall Street Journal:
Facebook Inc. is demanding that a New York University research project cease collecting data about its political-ad-targeting practices, setting up a fight with academics seeking to study the platform without the company’s permission.
The dispute involves the NYU Ad Observatory, a project launched last month by the university’s engineering school that has recruited more than 6,500 volunteers to use a specially designed browser extension to collect data about the political ads Facebook shows them.
In a letter dated October 16th to the Ad Observatory researchers, Facebook claims that their research violates their terms and conditions. The group recently discovered that Facebook was not labelling all the political ads to show who paid for them, which is against Facebook’s own disclosure rules.
John Oliver discusses the crucial role of the WHO
James Randi: Magician and sceptic dies aged 92
Although James Randi started his career as a magician and escapist in 1946, he gained notoriety in 1972 when he challenged Uri Geller’s claim of being a psychic. In 1976, alongside Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, he formed the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry to “promote scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims.” The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge he created never had a successful applicant.
Margalit Fox for The New York Times:
What roiled his blood, and was the driving impetus of his existence, Mr. Randi often said, was pseudoscience, in all its immoral irrationality.
“People who are stealing money from the public, cheating them and misinforming them — that’s the kind of thing that I’ve been fighting all my life,” he said in the 2014 documentary “An Honest Liar,” directed by Tyler Measom and Justin Weinstein. “Magicians are the most honest people in the world: They tell you they’re going to fool you, and then they do it.”
[…]
Though he was often called a debunker, Mr. Randi preferred the terms “skeptic” or “investigator.”
“I never want to be referred to as a debunker,” he told The Orlando Sentinel in 1991, “because that implies someone who says, ‘This isn’t so, and I’m going to prove it.’ I don’t go in with that attitude. I’m an investigator. I only expect to show that something is not likely.”
[…]
At 15, young Randall got his first taste of debunking and its discontents. Hearing of a local preacher who professed to read minds, he attended a service. He saw immediately that the preacher was using a time-honored mentalists’ trick, called the “one ahead,” in which a performer appears to divine the contents of sealed envelopes that he has previously opened and read.
When Randall stood up and exposed the fraud, congregants called the police; he spent several hours in jail before his father came to collect him. It would be the last time a jail cell could hold him, and the first time he became attuned to people’s astonishing willingness to be deceived.
RIP.
