With news coming from multiple mediums and sometimes questionable sources, being able to fact-check the news has become an essential skill.
On this week's Our Changing State: Election 2024 podcast, host Matthew Peddie sits down with Alex Mahadevan, the director MediaWise, Poynter Institute’s digital media literacy project, to talk about how to fact-check the news.
Fact-checking on a local level
Fact-checking can support local communities and elect people looking out for their best interests, according to Mahadevan. He noted there is a lack of resources and attention on fact-checking hyperlocal races, including in the Tampa Bay region.
“On the Sarasota Memorial Hospital board, there are multiple anti-vaxxers. Now they got onto the hospital board because they either ran unopposed or nobody paid attention to the down-ballot races. But most importantly, there were no fact checkers who were checking what they were saying about vaccines, who were checking what they were saying about hospital staff and how the hospital is doing, and now it's something that I've never seen before,” Mahadevan said.
Fact-checking websites
“Snopes is a great fact-checking organization that has gotten a lot more into political fact-checking,” Mahadevan said. “But really, if you check out the International Fact-Checking Network’s website, they have dozens and dozens and dozens of fact checkers around the world and around the U.S. who are doing really good work and staying on top of political misinformation, or really misinformation of any kind.”
Getting information right
On the national level, Mahadevan said fact-checking coverage of former President Donald Trump is a good example.
“I believe that Donald Trump is one of the most fact-checked, potentially the most fact-checked person, ever, because he's someone who makes lots and lots and lots of claims, and many of those claims don't pass muster,” he said.
Mahadevan explained why he believes fact-checking worked well during Trump’s administration.
“… PolitiFact and the Washington Post fact checker, they focused on specific policy claims, specific claims that actually would make a difference in people's lives. And because there was so much scrutiny on the things Trump was saying and doing, people were finally starting to see these fact checks, and they were really dialed in.
“So you had part of the media that was really focused on kind of the sexier stuff, or the more inflammatory stuff that Trump did, but the PolitiFacts and the Washington Post, they were making sure policy stuff was staying front and center.”
Who is most susceptible to misinformation?
Contrary to popular belief, young people are vulnerable to believing falsehoods online, Mahadevan said, citing a report researchers at Stanford University did on the matter in 2016.
“… it was kind of a given that they are digital natives. They grew up with the internet. They grew up with iPads that they might see something fake online and double-check because they were used to navigating the internet, and that was incorrect,” Mahadevan said.
Since then, the team behind the report, now a nonprofit called the Digital Inquiry Group, created a free curriculum to help students evaluate information they find online.
“MediaWise came into the picture because we needed millions of people to learn these tools and techniques very quickly before the 2020 election, basically,” Mahadevan said. “So we started in 2018, and so through 2018, through 2020, we were creating all sorts of videos on Instagram originally, but YouTube, TikTok, and teaching people three important questions to ask: who's buying the information, what's the evidence, and what are other sources saying?
“That's one of the lessons that Stanford came up with, lateral reading, how to open lots of tabs and do searches, reverse image searching. So we were always kind of the scaling partner in this, and trying to take the lessons they learned from fact checkers and get it into the hands of as many people as possible, reach people where they were, too.”
Older adults are also just as susceptible to misinformation as young people; however, they’re targeted more by scams and misleading political ads, Mahadevan said. He added MediaWise created online courses to help older adults with this.
“We partnered with AARP to make sure that older adults could learn the exact same thing that we were teaching teenagers, and they could employ it too,” he explained. “So we teach them to navigate the internet the same way that teenagers do. They might just be on a different platform, like Facebook.”
Combatting misinformation on social media
Mahadevan said it takes a holistic approach, as fact checkers need time to look at information they’ve found.
“So fact-checking and debunking big pieces of misinformation, but doing what MediaWise does and media literacy, so teaching people how to fact-check themselves. So that way, when they come across a piece of misinformation, it doesn't matter if it's been fact-checked, they can fact-check it on their own,” he said.
Mahadevan called this idea “prebunking.”
“…we show teenagers, or we show older adults, or we show Spanish speakers, this is a piece of misinformation about immigration or abortion or something that you might see. Here is why you might want to share it. Here are the manipulation techniques, and here's how we debunk it, and so that way kind of sticks in their head. It inoculates them against that misinformation, and then when they see it in the wild, they can debunk that on their own. And there is a lot of research that has shown that prebunking is very effective at changing people's behavior online.”
