When Donald Trump said in May last year that he was “confident” that a vaccine would be ready by the end of 2020, the US president was ousted by NBC with what has become a popular journalistic and political tool in recent years: the ” fact checking “. “Experts say he needs a ‘miracle’ to be right,” the broadcaster said.
Facebook used the same device last week on a piece by UnHerd criticizing the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 investigation because it described the possibility of the virus leaking from a laboratory in Wuhan as ‘extremely unlikely’. The social media platform labeled the article a ‘fake information’ label, although the origin of the virus has not yet been determined. Facebook claims the article contains “information. . . that independent fact-checkers say it is false ”. After UnHerd objected, Facebook apologize; three days later, the White House expressed ‘deep concern’ over the WHO inquiry.
I find these examples worrying. In both cases, these are not facts that have been checked. Perhaps Trump had no evidence to justify his confidence. But to “fact-check” his views feels to me like the politicization of a device meant to support objectivity. Fact-checking can be a powerful tool in the fight against untruth. But it can be used as censorship if not only facts but also opinions and narratives are checked.
Facebook’s intervention is of particular concern, especially in light of the company’s decision to block the posting of legitimate news organizations in Australia. It did not completely remove UnHerd’s article, but the algorithms are programmed so that anything with a “fake information” tag appears less on users’ news feeds.
Facebook has partnerships with independent fact-checkers such as Full Fact and PolitiFact, which are part of the International Fact-Checking Network and adhere to a common set of principles. But in the UnHerd case, the decision was made by the company’s internal fact-checking team, which offers little transparency about its operation. “If an Internet business itself makes decisions about content moderation under the label fact checking, it’s not fact checking,” says Will Moy, CEO of Full Fact.
What is called fact-checking all too often feels like political scoring, but with the veneer of impartiality. In the run-up to the US election last year, a number of outlets conducted fact-checking a video of Joe Biden apparently getting confused about Trump’s name and referring to someone named George. “No, Biden did not confuse George W. Bush and Donald Trump,” the Washington Post wrote, arguing that he probably spoke directly to interviewer George Lopez.
The newspaper claimed that Biden was confused “four Pinocchios” – his onslaught for the most fraudulent claims. I watched the video and find it unlikely that Biden addressed Lopez, but neither I nor the Post can be sure anyway. I think the fact-checking of such an allegation makes a mockery of the whole concept. And scoring systems like the number of “Pinocchios” or PolitiFact’s “Truth-O-Meter” make it even harder to draw nuanced conclusions.
Stephen Ceci, a professor of psychology at Cornell, suggests that one solution could be to institute ‘conflicting fact-checking’: have fact-checkers from different sides of the political spectrum investigate a claim and present the competing evidence to the public.
It seems to me sensible: where ambiguity exists, it must be communicated. I do not want to live in a postmodernist world in which no objective reality is acknowledged – facts are important and necessary for a functional democracy.
Fact checking helps, but excessive reach should be avoided. Last week, a newsletter from the Poynter Institute complained that the social media app Clubhouse, which allows users to listen to and participate in audio discussions, poses ‘barriers to fact-checking’ because it does not preserve its audio files or recordings .
Used correctly, it disputes factual falsities in ways that complement freedom of speech. But freedom of speech is about people being both wrong and right. We need to limit the checking to facts, which are difficult, and not opinions that the checkers happen to dislike.