There’s a lot of evidence that suggests that people don’t care about the facts anymore. For the umpteenth time, PoltiFact pointed out this week that the latest claim that President Barack Obama was born outside the United States is a big fat lie and that the video tape of Obama admitting his Kenyan birth is a doctored falsehood.
Last week, a CNN poll pointed out that 27 percent of Americans believe the president was “probably” or “definitely” foreign-born.
Politcal science researcher Brendan Nyhan has argued that many American citizens have bad information and — even in the face of clear proof that they are wrong — these citizens are unable to correct their misperceptions. The Internet has only made things worse, Nyhan says, because for all the good information out there, there is enough bad information to support any distortion.
So the misinformed simply carry on with their wrong conclusions. “It’s never been easier to be wrong and at the same time feel more certain that they’re right,” wrote Joe Keohane in a story on Nyhan’s research last month in The Boston Globe.
When information reinforces what we already believe, we tend to accept it without skepticism. And when it challenges what we believe, we dismiss it.
It was against this backdrop that we at the Poynter Sense-Making Project teamed up with the folks at NewsTrust last week to run a pilot program testing whether citizens could use the tools of the Internet to determine whether a factual assertion was true. We called it the Truthsquad. (Full disclosure: The folks at NewsTrust had the great idea, came up with the name, found most of the funding and built the site. When they invited us in, we leaped. It was a great project.)
We selected 12 quotes, provided a handful of links to get people started and told them to figure it out. About 3,700 people visited the site. About 300 of them actually participated in the pilot. And on average, each user viewed close to two of the supporting links.
We learned that most people, when challenged to consume information critically, can do it. It didn’t take long to start reading these assertions for key words and information that might be used to distort.
For instance, when Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, declared, “Seniors guaranteed Medicare benefits will remain the same,” several volunteer fact-checkers pointed out that the word “guaranteed” is a big qualifier. Indeed, it turns out that many benefits will change — just not the guaranteed ones. And the White House document quoting Sebelius never once delineates what a guaranteed benefit is.
And when Bill O’Reilly declared that “in the [Arizona] capital city Phoenix, crime is totally out of control,” volunteer fact-checkers went out and found the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report for Arizona that showed otherwise.
Sure, it was a small experiment. Less than 10 percent of the people who looked at the site even tried to figure out if the quotes were accurate. But when they did, the crowd managed to figure it out. We went behind and provided a ruling, based on our professional experience. We generally agreed with the majority.
There’s a glimmer of hope in all this. People can learn to be more critical of the information they consume. The big trick is to get them motivated.
Fabrice Florin, executive director of NewsTrust, and Jon Mitchell, managing editor, are looking for ways to get more people motivated. They may add more gaming elements. They want to allow citizens to upload their own facts for checking.
Perhaps most telling of all: 28 people changed their minds. And on average, each one did so twice, moving between “true,” “false” and “not sure.” When more people change their minds, we’ll make a dent in this culture of being wrong.
