Join the Newswise editorial team to learn how our Fact Check submission option can help your experts get placements with their commentary about important topics. Help counter false claims and misinformation.
What: Fact Check articles are some of the most read on Newswise. This article has received over 125,000 visitors to date! Explore more Fact Check examples here. Newswise editorial team will go over the best practices on how to submit a Fact Check.
Where: Newswise Live event space on Zoom - link will be sent after registration
When: Wednesday, Sept 29th, 2 PM EDT
This live event will also be recorded for use by media and communicators after it is concluded.
Suggestions or feedback on what you'd like to see covered? Write to [email protected]
Transcript:
Thom: Hello and welcome everyone, today we’re doing a Newswise Live Webinar about fact checks.
Why fact check? This is my title slide and the cartoon below is the answer – did you fact check this before ever posting it, one of the characters says to the other, and the other responds – well I don’t have to because it already agreed with my preconceived views. That’s the big problem that we’re dealing with nowadays with not only people trying to disseminate misinformation but the viral nature of social media allowing organic sharing as well as manipulated practices that are enabling people to spread misinformation farther and wider than ever before and it’s my view that because of that phenomenon and especially the last 10 – 15 years of the growth of social media and other kinds of web technologies to enable these sharing phenomenon to happen, it’s our responsibility to do more to combat it, as PIOs and communicators.
So, we’ll go ahead and get into some of the details about Fact Check.
I want to go to our website in a moment and show you a few examples of how this is done in terms of the Newswise website, but just in first discussing how to select something for fact checking. This is something that our editorial team here at Newswise have discussed at length and there's probably been as many topics that we’ve decided not to fact check, as there have been ones that we have fact checked, because it is complicated and it’s a nuanced process.
My first point here is that it's easiest to choose a claim that is very specific and can therefore be given a pretty straightforward true or false rating.
There's also man examples, as we’ll go through in some of the information and resources that we want to share, about incorrect interpretation of data and sometimes that can involve some grey area, if somebody who is putting out some statement, whether it be a public official or someone on social media, when there is that grey area, there is a lot of room for opinion and people drawing certain kind of conclusions based on their view of the evidence and these are therefore more difficult to pin down, but I still believe that they can be effective material for a fact check, because its then up to the fact checker to break the claim down into those individual points and point out where the logic breaks down between what the data and science shows and whatever conclusion or interpretation that the claimer is making. And that’s where we have also options for a kind of somewhat true and somewhat false rating. We do a five-point scale on this and we’ll show you some more about that if you haven’t seen that – shortly.
When we’re talking about opinion – claims that are a matter of opinion, these are much, much harder to fact check in a straightforward way. When there's not reference to specific or discrete factual material, these are not the most effective topics to necessarily approach as a fact check and one of the things that we’re often debating and discussing amongst our team is whether to put forth an effort to put something out as a fact check or as an alternative, put something out -as what we call - often a call for experts, you’ve certainly seen those from us and our editorial team. Craig will send out an email and say – we’re looking at this current event that’s unfolding and we want to know if you have any experts who can comment on it, and those comments certainly we hope are backed up by science and can refer to specific data, but often that matter of opinion and the knowledge underpinning those things is something that an authoritative incredible expert can address, maybe more effectively or at least more easily than a fact check.
So when we’re talking about what sources of material – social media is obviously a prime one. We try to often look for either something that’s trending or something that’s been spread by someone who is particularly influential and will show how the fact check system requires that you put – who is the person claiming whatever comment it is that’s being fact checked, and of course public officials and their statements, whether that be in a news release or covered by media and quoted in other articles. Or press conferences that are publicized on television or in other forms of media, and of course news outlets themselves. There are a lot of organisations that report to be news outlets with journalistic standards and they don’t always live up to those standards and so fact checking as a sort of media criticism I think is also an appropriate area to look for material to fact check.
So I'm going to pause my screen share for just a moment so that I can navigate to the Newswise website and show you just a couple of examples of where some of this information goes. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about how we’ve developed this system so that it can effectively be tagged and indexed by Google News, and I'm going to share the floor with my colleague Craig who can go over what some of those technical requirements are.
Meanwhile just to show you more of what I'm describing here - as an example, if you visit the Newswise website, under the sections menu you'll see the link to the Google Fact Check section of our news. So as we go to that we’ve got several that – you can see that Newswise has done as well as some from our members. There's one from Clemson – great to see that, and I’ll just take a look at that as an example just to point out a few quick things – the important thing to start out with is, clearly identifying what is the claim that's being fact checked and so this here is an example of – some comments here made by one Oliver Smith, that claim being clearly detailed, as well information here about when it was published and what that rating is. So here's that rating area where we’ve got all the way false, mostly false, half true, mostly true and all true – and by providing that claim with the link to it, and all this other detail including who that person is and when it was made, this is all part of what goes into the coding, the HTML tags and what not that Google has set up as part of their system so that it can then be indexed by Google News.
So if you're not familiar with that, I'm just going to navigate to the Google News website.
When you post anything on Newswise, it's almost immediately going to be indexed in Google for just basic web search. Most articles also will get indexed by Google as a news item. There's some variation to that and it's not 100% that every article will be treated that way but most of them are and then of course there's the more specific area of Google News.
So here we are on the Google News homepage and the more specific area here to the fact check side shows some examples of some recent fact checks. So these codes and html markup that's all kind of in the background when you're entering this into our system, those are the things that then match up with google system so that if they determine that the fact check is high quality and index it in google News as a fact check, it will then be able to appear in this side bar.
Those are all parts of the process here and some of the technical requirements that we have the capability for when we’re talking about going back to how to pick something to fact check, we’re also going to share some ideas about what are some of those types of misinformation and how to spot it, but meanwhile I want to hand it over to my colleague Craig.
Craig: Thanks Thom, what I'll do is I’ll go to the contribution form and just go over some of the points here.
So, many of you have worked with us are familiar with this contribution form. It’s the same thing for all kinds of releases. The form changes a bit depending on which type so obviously we’re working on Fact Check here, so it's going to open up some fields here. These fields are necessary as Thom said for the index to recognise this, it’s a fact check so you need your claim and you need to fill out all these areas in order for it to realise it’s a fact check.
Headline is important. I usually mention when I'm writing a fact check – the claim that is being made and addressing it and basically giving a verdict of it or at least hinting at it saying that this claim is misleading. That kind of helps the reporters looking at this.
So, similar to – just like a regular news release that you're submitting to Newswise, these fact checks show up on our wires as well.
So we want to make sure – so just like in the news releases you want to fill out the headline and the description, but you also – here the additional details are the fact check – for instance the claim. So if it's like a tweet from a famous person that’s getting shared, you can put that content of that tweet in here or something like shared on social media, or a meme – you just want to make sure cause its going to show up on the right where Thom was showing you where that claim is seen.
Add your claim in here, the claim publisher – so if it was like on one of those blog posts and it was shared – or on Instagram, you can put Instagram – it's really up to you what you want to put here but the more information to give to our readers the better. And the date of the claim – obviously that’s pretty straightforward, you just start entering the date there, and a link to that claim – just put the whole link in there and then here is where you'll add what you're rating.
So most of you will be filling this out for say an expert that is giving you a comment to address this claim – so you just add – so they might not necessarily say whether it's true, false or half-truth – that’s something that you might want to ask them as how would they rate this claim. If they haven’t – I would just make your best guess about what it's going to be, because there is some nuance to it. Thom was mentioning that the false and true ones are easiest to do and then we give some room with these.
And then the content here – so you can write your content in here, it’s a great place for that quote that you're getting from the expert, you can just paste this right in here to address the claim – I recommend adding the claim that's being made and then following up with how you rate it and why. I think that's the best practice, the most standard and then the rest of it is just the standard – the way that we submit this, that you would do in any news release and I don’t think I need to go over that cause most of you have done this before.
So again, just to reiterate, the form changes when you're submitting a fact check and you need to fill out all these necessary points.
Back to you Thom.
Thom: We’ll take a look at a couple of examples and talk about some of the best practices in my view for how to draft and compose these – but first I want to talk a little bit more about how to select what you're fact checking and ways to approach this analysis. I’ll share my screen again – we’ve got here two really great resources that I've found – describing lots of different types of misinformation and logical fallacies etc.
So this chart here details pretty thoroughly all the different kinds of logical fallacies or other sorts of bias in these kinds of claims that can be fact checked. So fake news, fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry picking, conspiracy theories – what I recommend is when at all possible, refer to these kind of concepts, these rhetorical concepts as part of the evaluation and analysis of the claim that’s being fact checked and as Craig said trying to – in the headline for example, point out what is the piece of misinformation or the source of that misinformation and then some indication of what the analysis is. So, one could say – person X makes claim Y, but it's cherry-picking. That’s a very simplified idea of that but that’s essential the formula for a really effective way to write that headline would be to call out each of those points if possible.
Furthermore as you get into drafting the body of that, as we saw with the one from Clemson that we were just looking at, it was pretty brief. They don’t need to be that long. If you want to certainly there is a call for getting into more exhaustive detail on some of these, but if it's possible at all to simple state as objectively as possible what the claim is, refer to an expert or citation of an experts work that can then be weighing in on it and essentially most of the time we’re looking at something that’s disproving something or debunking it – using that expert comment or that citation to the research work as the evaluation while trying to be as objective as possible and using unbiased and neutral language in terms of the description of what the claim is.
If you're interested in it, I would really recommend digging into what some of these different types of bias and science denial rhetorical tactics are, things like slippery slope and red herring are very popular and commonly known. Straw man, atheneum, those are all ones that people are quite familiar with and then there's some others that might be a little bit less obvious.
I'm not familiar for example with what exactly a blowfish is, that is something that I would have to look up and get into, but you can see here from this, as it works a little bit of road map, to show you as you're evaluating something that you think might be eligible to be a good fact check topic, take a look at a resource like this and see – does anything that I'm seeing here that kind of raises a red flag for me, does it fit in with any of these kinds of definitions of that misinformation.
Another resource that I found to be very effective is this little checklist of pseudo-science and pseudo-science really being a catch all for a form of misinformation, especially misinformation that purports to be scientific and that’s something especially with a worldwide event like the pandemic, is something that becomes quite prolific.
For example – it's unfalsifiable. A vague or unobservable claim that quite literally couldn’t be proven wrong, that's one form of misinformation that's worth addressing.
Other things like anecdotes, cherry picks, technobabble, these are all tactics that peddlers of misinformation use and are again important details to provide as part of evidence for whatever evaluation and rating that you're giving to the claim.
So we’ve talked about the technical requirements, we talked about a few points of how to select misinformation, now it's time to talk about the elephant in the room – social media and politics are probably the biggest and most prolific sources of misinformation that needs to be fact checked. We try really hard to be objective and to steer away from things that are overtly political in terms of a partisan approach, but really facts are facts and it's important to consider the source and check your bias.
So I'm going to show you a couple of examples for really how big of a problem this is and why we wish to encourage our members to participate in this and why we’re taking it so seriously.
For example – this article recently from a technology review- troll farms reached 140 million Americans a month on Facebook, before the 2020 elections.
As somebody who grew up with the internet, as a millennial that I am, oldest millennial technically, I'm kind of in between Gen X and millennial but I feel like I learnt at an early age that anybody can say anything or pretend to be somebody online and it's something that, as its grown with social media – especially blogs and disintermediation of journalism as more citizen journalists or independent journalists have come to the fore because of the shake up of all these things over the last two decades, it's something that media literacy is more and more crucial and when we look at something like Facebook, which I'm going to beat up on a little bit today because it's shown time and again that it is a huge driver of misinformation- the people who are posting misinformation online and sharing it and involved in coordinated and inauthentic activity – they will share something, they’ll have paid actors out there or bots that are liking it and commenting on it in order to boost it and get it to trend, and then it ends up in your uncles Facebook feed and he shares it with everybody that you know. So this is not normal and this is not healthy, says the expert. When I share this pdf with everyone after today’s presentation, you're welcome to follow this link to technology review and read the full report.
The real scary part about this is that during a domestic election we’re being interfered with by actors from far off places that have whatever intent they might have; it could be nefarious or it could be just a matter of trying to get clicks and ad revenue – who knows. The point is that it's damaging and dangerous, and it’s a major reason why fact checking is becoming so important.
Another example – in 2019 almost all of Facebook's top Christian pages were run by foreign troll farms. There is some overlap here with politics and religion on social media, as a lot of people obviously see that the same kinds of groups will be peddling the same kind of information. So to know that, these sources, these pages that people will follow and share memes and go viral or get popular in some way or other, they're not who they purport themselves to be. As the article here says, the groups have been basically lodged in Kosovo and Macedonia and they're targeting American Christians with whatever information it is that they're putting out and again their motives are – well its hard to view those motives as authentic.
So take a look at that article when you have a chance.
Another study that I think is worth putting out and talking about here is the Psypost put out this article earlier this year that there is disparity here between conservatives and liberals in terms of their viewpoint on scientific information and this refers to one of the biases that we saw – in one of those charts where anecdotes get given more weight than they really deserve. And so this study demonstrated that conservatives were seen to think of anecdotal information to have almost as much legitimacy as scientific data. It becomes a problem when these things go viral and get seen by so many people, so here, one of the additional articles here from the Washington post, this is just from only a few weeks ago – misinformation got six times more clicks than factual news. This is an epidemic of misinformation that we’re living through right now.
Now, why does this all matter? Not only does it maybe irritate you when you see your uncle share something that you know is misinformation on Facebook, but it also influences policy and that has real world consequences and I’ll share for example this article from clinical infectious diseases – the journal from the infectious disease society of America – posted a year ago – relevant still today but posted a year ago – relaxation of social distancing and other interventions clearly led to the pandemic going in the wrong direction. In eight weeks prior to that point, the R Nott of the Covid spread was declining by day and when those regulations and restrictions were lifted, the reproducibility began to go up almost immediately.
So that environment of misinformation where Facebook is targeting certain kind of people actors from other parts of the world with nefarious intent are coordinating themselves to get this information out there, all of these things combine into a very unhealthy gumbo that ultimately leads to political policy and decisions being made that results in things going in the wrong direction, when we’re dealing with a pandemic.
What was the science saying at the time? Well – in March Fauci said – let's not spike the ball on the 5-yard line – as we started to get the vaccine out and people began to be hopeful that we could begin to return to normal, his warning was to say – let's not celebrate before its really over, and here we are 6 months later and things have been almost as bad as they were 6 months ago, until only in the last few days that the pandemic and the number of news cases a day have gone down- whilst still daily deaths remain around 2000 per day.
So, Dr. Fauci was clearly prescient with his warning in March and again as a response to this environment of misinformation influencing policy, that warning had legs.
So, what is the ROI of all this?
We’ve talked a little bit about how to find something to fact check, some of the techniques for – how the style of the composition can be helpful, we’ve talked about what are the reasons why this is so important – ultimately as I know, all of you want to know is – what are you going to get from it and why is it important and what’s the result going to be? So some of the things that we’ve tracked and demonstrated are these fact checks get very high page views.
It can possibly result in citations in news coverage, there's SEO value, linking back to your own website and having your experts name and commentary showing up high on search results for controversial current topics. All these are reasons why the ROI is effective and my colleague Craig has been tracking some of this with some of the ones that we’ve done recently, so I know he has some examples of what some of those stats might be, Craig what can you tell us for some example on some of those ROI points?
Craig: As Thom mentioned, these fact checks get particularly high viewers and shares and we do have a poll on whether you agree with us, so a lot of people feel like it's more interactive and they can take part in that process, that vetting process.
So, my experience as far as media coverage of these fact checks – I have seen a few clips show, mostly a lot of collective – its really hard to say because a lot of fact check organizations like factcheck.org, we all come for very similar things, and so it’s hard to tell where people are getting their information from, so I’d like to say that we are collectively helping for the greater good, as far as showing truth.
We do take clips, like this is a site called Forward Kentucky and they pretty much copied our fact check verbatim and they put it on here and they are using it – obviously this site has sort of a political agenda, but they really enjoy posting our fact checks to address some of these issues.
There's another clip of a fact check that we did in Texas, a business journal, and they’ve used the same one about masks, to make a point about masks here.
So they do get some coverage. Again though – I find that a lot of these fact checks get some really – like above 30K viewers, one of them got like a 100,000 viewers which is pretty extraordinary for a Newswise article, its this one right here if you're interested – Debunking the claim of that vaccines cause new variants, because the person who made the claim was the 2008 Nobel prize winner in medicine. So I get a lot of emails about this one, particularly –
Thom: If I could just interject there quickly for you Craig – he mentioned the polling on our thing and we do some activity that looks to be some brigading from the anti vaxxer community who may share something and then come and down vote it – so I'm going to appeal to all of our members, all you PIO’s – get in there and click agree if you do agree, because there's clearly inauthentic behavior going on there with some of that, because we see those emails coming in criticizing us and saying how dare you fact check a Nobel prize winner – so that’s just fair to point out with the polling, it's not perfectly scientific. Go ahead Craig.
Craig: Yeah, that’s a good point, but you know as we say in public relations, any sort of publicity is good publicity. But this was a tough one because this guy – he did state some claims that I tried to write and address that were simply false and Thom mentioned some of our calls for experts that we send out to all on the query list and so I sent this one out – so getting someone to make a statement and one of the quotes is I think personally the best way to address it. So whether obviously there's some nuance and this guy has some opinion on the speeches he made, but particularly he said some things that are downright false and we backed up the claim of our fact check with WHO – the world health organization and several citations here that we’ve used to show that – to backup how we judged this claim.
Thom: Thank you Craig.
That just about wraps up what we have in terms of our presentation. I got a question over the chat – just to show one more time here the fact check area on google news, where this has the potential to get indexed, so if you go to news.google.com there is the fact check area over here to the side and that’s where you’ll see – as Craig mentioned – we’re part of the whole pack of fact checkers, like fact check dot org and politifact and of course major media outlets get in on the fact check situation themselves and those will often be the highest that will be ranked – In the past ones that we’ve seen from Newswise get indexed here, have been ones that we fact check something that other outlets maybe haven’t covered yet, and so that’s another reason and there's some impetus to try to respond quickly and if you would be ever able to get us something that one of your experts is paying close attention to and its able to get out there quickly – the chances of that getting indexed into this fact check sidebar on google news, is higher. They will weight things by not only the reputation of the website but also by the quality of the article and the timeliness of the article.
So it is some competition to get in there of course and we are ultimately and as always with our factchecks, as anything that you give on Newswise, we are connecting it with media so that they can be aware of what’s happening and possibly your experts are someone that they can reach out to and interview or ask follow up questions, but the chance of your article even getting in here on its own is a good one if you do it right.
I want to then wrap things up here and just share some final thoughts in conclusion.
Peddlers of misinformation as we’ve seen are flooding every possible platform with their content and therefore we as ethical and responsible communicators, representing organizations with authority, have a responsibility to create more content that pushes back against that misinformation. And if you have any doubts about doing this, I will say – there is no scenario in which we could do too much fact checking and promotion of credible news.
The people out there in Macedonia or wherever who are trying as hard as they can to get their stuff trending – they don’t have an qualms posting it in as many places as they can and taking whatever tactic they can and we’re not fighting fire with fire, we’re fighting fire with fire extinguishers and let's not be meek about it, let's not be modest about it – it's important and its worth doing and it’s worth doing often and loudly.
That’s my take home for you, if anybody has any questions, please feel free to get in touch, you can always email me at [email protected] and feel free to reach out to our whole editorial team at [email protected], if you're working on something like this and you want to collaborate about it and go over any of it with us we would love to do that and can be ready to do that kind of thing – really quickly jump in on zoom and go over the details of what you're working on and help out with it so that it can be a success.
Thank you all so much for coming and we look forward to seeing what you fact check and hearing from you if you have any questions or want to work on this kind of thing together.
Thanks everybody, have a great day. Stay safe, stay healthy and good luck.
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