Believes
Google believes that the results of “fact checking” will help people make more robust judgments and form a reasoned opinion in an environment where thousands of articles are published per minute.
However, in the release Tactfully put down the question, what is this for “fact checking organizations”? Who will decide what to consider as truth, and what is fiction? Who will check them themselves?
Fact check from Google
The organization that provides Google and Amazon fact-finding service – Duke Reporters’ Lab. It is a company created on the basis of the University of Duke, since its leader, Bill Edeir, since 1945.
Bill Edeir was a co-author and editor of the local fact-finding website PolitiFact. In 2009, the site received the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 2008 presidential elections. The site publishes political news collected from various sources, with scores on a six-point scale, from “True” to “Pants on fire!”
In 2013, the Foundation Knightov, proposed Bill Eidhera to replace Sarah Cohen in the fund-paid place of the professor at the University of Duke. Bill Edeir also replaced Sarah Cohen as head of the Duke Reporters’ Lab, a platform for online discussion of innovations in journalism, as they call it at the university.
Among colleagues, Bill Edeira is called the “digital era journalist”. He was an active supporter of electronic journalism tools and an ideologist in the development of the iOS-application for checking the facts of “Settle It! PolitiFact’s Argument Ender.”
Bill Edeir intends to extend his experience with fact checking in PolitiFacts to many other organizations. Duke Reporters’ Lab maintains a database of fact-finding sites, currently including 115 sites around the world. The database includes sites without a pronounced political position, regularly publish evaluation materials about the truthfulness or falsity of statements by news agencies, journalists, politicians and other public figures.
Criteria for inclusion in the database:
- The site should consider facts from all parties and parties involved
- Investigate each individual statement and arrive at a general conclusion
- Monitor implementation of promises of election programs
- Disclosure of sources and methods of research
- Disclose sources of funding and counterparties
- Put the dissemination of truthful information above other goals
Websites related to political parties or government structures are not allowed in the database.
What is a “fact check”
Verification of facts is a discipline recently separated from journalism. The most famous of its representatives are PolitiFacts and FactCheck.org. Verification of facts involves breaking the source material into a list of single facts, checking each fact for reliability, accuracy and general veracity, after which the source material as a whole is given a verdict: authentically or not. Estimates of the activity of such sites, on the whole, are positive. However, in the journalistic community there are serious contradictions on the principle of fact verification.
The Wall Street Journal group of journalists believes that monosyllabic value judgments prevent readers from delving into the text of articles and the theses of politicians. Instead of independently evaluating each individual application, readers distribute a monosyllabic evaluation to the entire article. For example, if an article is assessed as “Almost True,” readers miss a specific unreliable moment in the article, considering each proposed fact to be “almost true.”
Time employee believes that the rating system proposed by PolitiFact is not flexible enough. It is necessary to mark in a special way facts and judgments that can not be corroborated or refuted, honest errors and occasional irresponsible statements. Otherwise, PolitiFact is acting contrary to its purpose: they create a deliberately false impression.
In addition, the principles of fact checking are criticized for assessing only the facts offered, but not the principle and the emotional coloring of their presentation. From this point of view, someone can represent a small achievement as huge, and successfully pass the test – after all, achievement is.
Many articles and statements can not be unequivocally assessed as truthful or false. For example, if we are talking about quantitative estimates. In such cases, it is important, the author was mistaken, to a greater or lesser extent, and both variants may carry a different context.
A separate direction for criticism is the commercial basis of organizations providing fact checking services. Like traditional media, such organizations are dependent on advertisers and other investors. They can, in some ways, influence evaluations, thereby attracting additional users or performing a commercial order.
Do not forget that the fact-finding organizations are exactly the same journalists as in the usual media. This problem is described by the Latin phrase: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes” – “Who will guard against the watchmen themselves?”. When setting up supervisory organizations, it is accepted that the “watchman” is fundamentally different from what they are supposed to control. Education, goals, social stratum, position in the hierarchy of public service. In the case of verification of facts, organizations consist of exactly the same people, with the same education, goals and connections as ordinary journalists. According to 62% of American voters, they are ordinary journalists, and do not deserve additional privileges for the words “fact checking” in statements.
Fact checking and journalism
Media space choked from an incredible amount of open fraud, manipulation, misinformation and outright lies, presented to the media as news. This ensured public demand for the services of fact-finding organizations. As you know, demand creates supply. Even in Google and Amazon did not resist, decided to use fact-checking as a competitive advantage. Russia’s Foreign Ministry opened its own fact-finding service.
However, trends in the media space are changing rapidly. Will fact checks be equally in demand in a year? In five years? To understand, you need to understand how facts verification in journalism works, how it works now, and why it works so.
To establish that an event took place, the journalist should receive two independent confirmation of the event. It is advisable that these be different acknowledgments. For example, an oral story and a fragment of video filming.
After receiving two confirmations, the journalist should check the sources. This process is a small journalistic investigation. It is necessary to establish that the source had the opportunity to obtain the information that he provided, and did not have a direct connection with the second source. To do this, the journalist begins his own study of the question, requests the internal regulations of organizations in which the sources work, uses cartographic services and public sources of photographs to confirm the actual state of things on the ground. In general, it performs traditional operational work.
Only after the journalist was convinced of the independence of sources and the factual availability of each source of transmitted information – he can publish the data.
With the rapid development of social Networks, traditional media began to compete with public opinion leaders, bloggers. For an ordinary person, the fact expressed by a blogger is just as important as information from traditional media. At the same time, bloggers are not bound by journalistic ethics and professional norms, they can afford to publish information faster and more often than a professional editorial. To withstand competition, the media began to gradually reduce the level of verification. As a result, they fell to the same level as their competitors.
Fact-finding organizations must solve this problem by returning journalism to the previous level with the help of their services. But now none of these organizations is carrying out a traditional journalistic check on two independent confirmations and analysis of sources. They are engaged exactly in what is written in the title – they check only the facts for truth and falsity.
As it stands, verification of facts does not solve the task and is a dead end of journalism. The principle of verification of facts does not carry a more effective method than a journalistic check. Over time, publishers will learn to manipulate the facts in such a way that articles pass Fact Checking in the right way.
How to Live Now?
The only possible solution: to learn how to conduct journalistic verification yourself. This is a task similar to the identification of cognitive distortions.
First of all, you need to find the primary source of information. Even if the article states, “according to an anonymous source,” details about this anonymous source still need to be provided to make it clear that he could have access to the facts presented. If the source is not specified at all, googlegun works well on the key theses of the material. If it is impossible to find the primary source, then before you fake or unfair journalistic work, which is equally bad.
Next, you need to use your senses and think under what conditions the specified data could come from the specified source. Recently, a popular method of deception is to show a piece of wood or piece of iron with traces of explosions or shots, and then state that it was a shot and a blasted by someone specific. The only way to get such a conclusion is to conduct two independent examinations by a blind method. If data on the examination is not provided, before you – manipulation of consciousness based on fake.
Every fact has its own history, its own way of conducting the examination and the corresponding requirements for regulations and documents. Another traditional way of manipulation: to exclude from consideration certain documents, so that others allow to expose the fact in a certain light. For example, you can accidentally forget that we have a law in the country that gives certain rights to the president, who has ceased to discharge his duties and members of his family. When reading or viewing, you need to ask, “but do I know enough about the internal rules and regulations associated with the phenomenon, are all the documents presented in the study?”
After you establish that the existence of information is fundamentally Perhaps, and submitted all the necessary documents and regulations, you need to find links to at least two independent sources.
If you use the principle of journalistic verification long enough, you will be able even at the stage of reading the title and the first paragraph of the definition To confirm which evidence will be sufficient to recognize the material as reliable. You can quickly find them in the body of the article.
What about “Fact Check” from Google
As I hope, I showed in this article that the approach to verifying the facts of organizations, on the basis of which data the “die” will be drawn, can not be considered effective. The very presence of such an indication is the manipulation of consciousness. One can write a million times that the reader has the right to ignore the indication, but the brain is arranged in a certain way and is inclined to save energy. Therefore, the indication will influence the consciousness of most readers, reducing the critical threshold of perception.
And, if in Alexa the fact-finding function is activated on demand, Google imposes a vision of the world created by the circle of commercial organizations. We just have to strengthen our skepticism and teach the children to think independently, critically perceive the news.
Instead of the Ministry of Truth, we will have the Corporation of Truth. Be attentive.
P.S. I thank KarasikovSergey for the original note and constructive discussion.
