Fact Checking Refresher

When and where did this occur?

Fact checking is in the news a lot these days because of fake news. Concurrent with the US midterm elections this fall, fake news is anticipated to increase, attempting to confuse voters about facts.

Warnings abound, for instance this article from Axios: Fake News 2.0: The propaganda war gets sophisticated.

Here are a few points from the article:

"Bad actors are looking to mimic more normal communications, instead of spewing bright commentary that could get them flagged for spreading hate or violence."

"Language and behaviors are becoming a lot more sophisticated and human-like to avoid detection."

"The new trend is bad actors taking advantage of existing polarization to manipulate groups of real people, as opposed to creating or pretending to be groups of people."

If deliberate deception is ever-evolving to be less obvious, fake news (not just what Trump calls fake news) will be all the harder to detect.

Fact checking is really the only remedy unless 1) your mind is already made up (you are polarized) and 2) you stay off the Web.

Let's assume there are still consumers of information whose minds aren't locked down and who venture online to be informed. How do they avoid consuming fake news?

Fact Check This

"FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead of Apparent Murder-Suicide." This was a headline and story picked up by Facebook during the 2016 Presidential Campaign. (Pew Researchers recently reported that 62 percent of American adults get their news from social media, in particular, Facebook: close to two-thirds of Facebook users get news from the platform. So this story wasn't trivial.)

Fact checking involves looking for proper nouns, claims, images, dates and numbers that may easily be investigated.

One could start with the the source: The Denver Guardian. It sounds real but the Denver Guardian does not exist except in fiction. The Website was launched in July of 2016 and most of it was unfinished at the time the article appeared. Immediately the story loses credibility.

From the content of the story, other facts are waiting to be checked. For example, a reference that credits TV news station WHAG-TV with coverage of the story. Examination of that station's site reveals no coverage, another red flag. 

The image of a burning house in the Denver Guardian first appeared on Flickr in 2010. Drag the image above into Google Image Search and look for matches (excuse the pun). What do you find?

Fake news is not limited to a few inaccuracies: they abound.

Next time you read something with potential consequences, take a moment to fact check it out.