2.6 Web Fact-checking

Mike Caulfield and Linda Macdonald

Whether it’s faking a letter from a chief executive to alter a corporate strategy, or staging a car crash to imply a faulty vehicle, fake news that generates headlines can–and has–hurt a company’s bottom line, pushing the stock price down and setting off a public relations nightmare that is, in many cases, irreversible.

Tesla, for example, faced one of these public relations nightmares in 2019 when a video appeared to show the self-driving Model S hitting an autonomous robot as it made its way to a consumer electronics show. The film of the car hitting the robot actually shows a rope pulling the robot over in front of it. The NBC article says that experts believe that the disinformation about the vehicle was calculated–designed to negatively affect public confidence and attack Tesla’s brand image.

Other companies have also been targeted by disinformation campaigns. Starbucks was falsely said to be giving free drinks to undocumented immigrants in the United States, and Tim Horton’s was falsely said to be running out of donuts the day after cannabis was legalized in Canada.

Misinformation (incorrect information) and disinformation (deliberately misleading information) can affect a business’ consumer confidence and bottom line. Your ability to identify inaccuracies can help prevent the spread of bad information, help you critically evaluate information as a consumer, and help you address any disinformation in your own organization.

This chapter provides you with a few of the web-based techniques that can get you closer to the truth on the web more quickly.

Four Moves

Michael Caulfield recommends that to move closer to the truth in information, you can do the following:

• Check for previous work: Look around to see if someone else has already fact-checked the claim or provided a synthesis of research.
• Go upstream to the source: Go “upstream” to the source of the claim. Most web content is not original. Get to the original source to understand the trustworthiness of the information.
• Read laterally: Read laterally. Once you get to the source of a claim, read what other people say about the source (publication, author, etc.). The truth is in the network.
• Circle back: If you get lost, hit dead ends, or find yourself going down an increasingly confusing rabbit hole, back up and start over knowing what you know now. You’re likely to take a more informed path with different search terms and better decisions.

In general, you can try these moves in sequence. If you find success at any stage, your work might be done. When you encounter a claim you want to check, your first move might be to see if sites like Politifact, Snopes, or even Wikipedia have researched the claim (Check for previous work).

If you can’t find previous work on the claim, start by trying to trace the claim to the source. If the claim is about research, try to find the journal it appeared in. If the claim is about an event, try to find the news publication in which it was originally reported (Go upstream).

Maybe you get lucky and the source is something known to be reputable, such as the journal Science or the newspaper the New York Times. Again, if so, you can stop there. If not, you’re going to need to read laterally, finding out more about this source you’ve ended up at and asking whether it is trustworthy (Read laterally).

And if at any point you fail–if the source you find is not trustworthy, complex questions emerge, or the claim turns out to have multiple sub-claims–then you circle back, and start a new process. Rewrite the claim, try a new search of fact-checking sites, or find an alternate source (Circle back).

The rest of this chapter will focus on the first two of Caulfield’s moves, checking for previous work and going upstream to the source. The chapter will also present ways to “spot the troll”.

Check for Previous Work

When fact-checking a particular claim, quote, or article, the simplest thing you can do is to see if someone has already done the work for you. You can use a reputable fact-checking source. You can also check particular sources using the “site” option.

Information from educational institution sites (often ending in .edu) and government websites (ending in .gc.ca; ourcommons.ca; .canada.ca; or parl.ca) may provide verifiable information. Online encyclopedias like The Canadian Encyclopedia can also be used for fact verification as well as reputable scientific organizations and history museums.

A reputable fact-checking site or subject wiki may have done much of the leg work for you by tracing claims to their source, identifying the owners of various sites, and linking to reputable sources for counterclaims. WhatsApp provides a link to the IFCN fact-checking chat bot that can be used to search information that appears on its social media. The bot uses information from organization around the world to verify information. Some of the sites listed below are among the signatories of the IFCN Code of Principles and have committed to non-partisan and accurate information.

The following organizations are generally regarded as reputable fact-checking organizations focused on Canadian news:

• AFP Canada
• FactsCan 
• Polimeter

The following organizations are generally regarded as reputable fact-checking organizations focused mainly on U.S. national news:

• Politifact
• Factcheck.org
• Washington Post Fact Checker
• Snopes
• Truth be Told
• NPR Fact-Check

Respected specialty sites cover niche areas such as climate, for example:

• Climate Feedback
• SciCheck
• Quote Investigator

Many fact-checking sites can be found outside the U.S. and Canada, including

• El Polígrafo (Mexico)
• The Hound (Mexico)
• Guardian Reality Check (UK)
• BBC Reality Check (UK)
• Channel 4 Fact Check (UK)
• Full Fact (UK)

You can find previous fact-checking by using the “site” option in search engines such as Google and DuckDuckGo to search known and trusted fact-checking sites for a given phrase or keyword. For example, if your housemate finds a post on social media about a free $25 gift card and it sounds too good to be true, you can search a couple known fact-checking sites for the keywords “Tim Hortons free gift card”.

According to its website, Snopes is the oldest and largest online fact-checking site. It’s reputation is upheld by other fact checking sources like FactCheck.org. Let’s use the DuckDuckGo search engine to look for the keywords using the format below and the Snopes site. Note the use of spacing between words and the punctuation. This format narrows your search to a specific site. Click on the link below. The first item listed will take you directly to the relevant Snopes page (Click the x on top right of the pop-up box if you get a message about ad blockers).

Click here to begin :  Tim Hortons free gift card:site:snopes

Select the first item to go to the Snopes page.

The results show that work has already been done in this area. In fact, the first result from Snopes answers our question almost fully. Remember to follow best search engine practice: scan the results and focus on the URLs and the blurbs to find the best result to click in the returned result set.