Twitter’s working on a program to fact check tweets. Unlike Facebook, they’re not allowing politicians to openly lie on the platform. While Facebook allows politicians to buy ads with misleading claims, Twitter is hoping to differentiate themselves with in-place fact checking. The program could roll out as early as next month, allowing Democratic primary voters to use Twitter to check the validity of candidates’ claims. A few of them wouldn’t do so well with this knowledge, but no one has more to lose than Donald Trump.
This is from 2012. His tweets these days actually have fewer three syllable words in them. I wonder what that means?
Twitter is Donald Trump’s social network of choice. He’s used it from everything from random thoughts (covfefe), harassment of journalists, harassment of jurors, instigation of wars, official policy decisions, discrimination against trans people, discrimination against Muslims, and much more. Yes, Twitter is Trump’s favorite place to tweet. The problem? His tweets are often falsehoods, like when he blamed climate change as a “Chinese hoax.” These falsehoods would now come with indicators. Will clear and obvious indications that a politician is lying change how our democracy works?
In This Article:
How Will Twitter’s System Work?
Twitter is currently trying a few systems that may go into place next week. A key component of them is a large banner below the tweet, warning users that it contains false or misleading information. Below that, or perhaps included with the banner, users can find information about why the tweet has this label. It could be that they misrepresented figures to make a point, that they lied about a certain policy, or that they’re lying for political reasons. Whatever the case, Twitter’s system won’t be influenced by political bias. It’ll only rely on demonstrable facts to prove falsehoods. They may use one of the methods below, or a combination of the two.
Fact Checkers
First is the obvious one. Fact checkers. Politifact, Snopes, and the Poynter Institute have been doing this for years. These are independent organizations that check statements made by politicians or stories spreading across the internet. They investigate and find factual information related to the claim. If they can disprove it, they point out that the claim is false. Otherwise, it’s verified.
Most people know Snopes, it’s a trusted source of fact checking on the web. But it’s certainly not the only one. You can do this fact checking yourself with a simple google search. Just be sure to only use reliable sites in your investigation.
Community Participation
The other option is community participation. At the top of the post you can see an example of this. With this model, users report a tweet as misleading or false and provide a correction. The community would be able to verify a person’s correction through a rating system. Those with consistently high ratings will be more trustworthy, and will get a shield next to their name, denoting they are a protector of Twitter’s trustworthiness.
This isn’t a system that would work well without independent third party fact checking. We’ve already seen examples of this across the web. Reddit is controlled by upvotes. How often do they need to come in and ban users, quarantine subreddits, fire mods, delete posts, and otherwise prune the cruft? And that’s a website that’s known for a higher than average rate of toxicity. Regularly, racist, homophobic, and transphobic comments make it to the front page. The website still hosts hate groups for LGBTQ people. There are many subs for hate groups of gay and especially transgender people on Reddit, and they thrive. This is all controlled by simple upvotes or downvotes. Clearly, voting on what’s right won’t help. It’s too easy to influence with bias or targeted campaigns. We need unbiased, independent fact checkers who don’t have a motive beyond checking facts.
Sorry, Internet, but I’ve been here a long time, and I just don’t trust you.
Will this Save Democracy or Hurt It?
Misinformation is going to be the largest problem for democracies in the near future. For example, we’re getting better at “deepfakes,” videos that look and sound normal, but are complete fabrications. That example above is from two years ago. Since then, we’ve gotten much better at such deepfakes.
Mike Bloomberg recently shared the video below. Makes him look like he crushed that debate, doesn’t it? If you watched the debate, he was torn apart, especially by presidential candidate Senator Elizabeth Warren. In fact, she so thoroughly crushed him, that not even the $600 million he spent on his campaign could keep him in the race. Look at the video he posted below. Doesn’t it look like he still has a promising chance at the nomination?
Anyone? pic.twitter.com/xqhq5qFYVk
— Mike Bloomberg (@MikeBloomberg) February 20, 2020
Obviously, it’s an edited video. Bloomberg scored no real points during the debate, as you might have already suspected. He dropped out today. But if not for fact checkers, you might not have known that video was faked. In fact, if you were a Bloomberg fan, you might have just believed it.
Crushing Confirmation Bias
Let’s look to the examples at the top of this article. Let’s say you want gun control legislation. You’ve seen too many mass shootings, and you just want it all to stop. You see what Bernie’s saying and you agree with it. You hit that like and retweet button faster than you can even think about checking the numbers. It’s confirmation bias. His tweet says what you want it to say. The same goes for coronavirus conspiracy theories and supposed evidence that the “Deep State” is out to get Trump. All are thoroughly dismantled with quick fact checks. But, because they confirm beliefs that people already hold, they don’t want to fact check it. They don’t want to be wrong. On a platform like Twitter, misinformation spreads like wildfire because of this.
Our social media and the way we consume information has made us a lacking a measurable attention span. We don’t spend the same time thinking about one issue or another. I’m just as guilty as anyone else. I never had a very great attention span. I’m politically involved and hit that retweet faster than I care to admit. However, there’s one thing I do right, and I hope you do it too. When something sounds too good to be true, I hope you fact check it. I know most people don’t, that’s how misinformation spreads so well. It’s how Trump won the 2016 election. It’s why conservatives don’t want you fact checking. But you have to.
Hopefully, Twitter enables fact checking across their site. It’s a frequent battleground in politics, made worse by the president using it instead of his White House press briefing room. If we don’t rein in fake news now, it’ll reign over us.