Frustrated fact-checkers: the lies keep being told

Lies have a life of their own, and people want to believe them, especially when they are about people they don't like, "the other". Facts don't sway people.

As Laura Hazard Owen recently reported in Nieman Lab, three leading fact-checking organizations have said their work needs to go beyond simply calling out the lies of prominent people. This work is valuable, but the fact-checkers don't have big enough audiences to reach everyone who is receiving the false or misleading information. "Fact checkers are outspent by [political] campaigns 100 to 1 or more at election times," say the fact-checkers. 

So the fact-checkers have issued a call to action in which they don't just clarify or disprove the misleading information. They "publish and act". "We seek corrections on the record, pressure people not to make the same mistake again, complain where possible to a standards body. In other words, we use whatever forms of moral, public, or where appropriate regulatory pressure are available to stop the spread of specific bits of misinformation."

See also: Nieman Lab's list of news credibility projects 

Less than half of people in 38 countries trust "most news most of the time". And they have very little trust in the news they find in social media. From Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2019, p. 21.

It takes a village to identify false news

Filloux: A credibility scorecard

Liberal democracies are being tested around the world by the rapid diffusion of misleading or false information designed to influence voters.

It has happened in France, Catalonia, the U.K., and, of course, the U.S.

Many have proposed--for example, the World Economic Forum--that two of the most powerful vehicles for spreading information, Facebook and Google, should be responsible for filtering out material that is demonstrably false or misleading.

Versión en español. 

But it turns out that this is not easy to do. False information is often irresistibly appealing and moves too fast to be stopped.

Why we're Still in the Dark about Facebook's Fight Against Fake News -- Mother Jones

Nine experts offer opinions on how to fix Facebook -- New York Times

Not an editor, but a scorecard

What's more, it is hard to define false news in a way that can be automated by algorithms. Journalist and media consultant Frederic Filloux has developed the News Quality Scoring Project, which attempts to use automated systems to evaluate the likely credibility of a piece of news content. It doesn't label news as false or fake. It simply gives a credibility score based on a series of indicators such as a publisher's or a journalist's previous reliability.

Filloux's Publication Quality Score criteria

Facebook, Google, and Twitter themselves are working with the Trust Project on an automated system to display "trust indicators" alongside information they share with users.