With the announcement Meta will end its fact checking program, people are wondering: What’s the best way for the digital media space to handle untruths, today and beyond?
Americans lost trust with fact checking when it became akin to a dictatorship — one small group of elites telling everybody what to think. We don’t trust dictatorships, even ones we consider benevolent, as history shows they always go wrong. But we also don’t want pure anarchy, where lawlessness and the powerful overwhelm society, and everyone else suffers.
The U.S. has a system of checks and balances, a democratic republic, which works to prevent anybody from having too much power while also keeping anarchic chaos at bay. Democratic republics are not perfect. They are merely, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, the least bad solution.
This same philosophy can be applied to fact checking and our information ecosystem.
Problems with fact checking (“Ministry of Truth”): Bias in fact checking is a clear concern: assertions that go against a preferred narrative are aggressively fact checked, while assertions that align with a preferred narrative are allowed to go forward and replicate without any comment. Sometimes, fact checkers draw conclusions that are subjective in nature. Not only are so-called “fact checks” sometimes wrong, but the vast majority of assertions of consequence are not 100% true or false. Labeling a claim as an absolute “truth” or “falsehood” is often used to stifle discussion of important nuance and facts.
Problems with not fact checking (“Anarchy”): Without any guardrails, blatant lies and untruths spread rapidly. Often, they are started or propagated by those with a specific agenda, both domestically and internationally, to manipulate people. They convince well-meaning people to spread these falsehoods. When there are no safeguards on information, we get chaos — people don’t know what to believe, and those with the most power, money and/or influence can manipulate others to serve their own ends.
A better solution (“Sunlight”): Show all the controversial narratives and assertions, alongside all the data that supports, combats, justifies, or disproves them. Don’t rely on a ministry of truth to tell you what or who to believe, or hope that anarchy will somehow sort itself out. Instead rely on open information and dialogue that is truly balanced. Society needs ways to organize information, not by censoring it, but connecting it into a balanced, bigger picture in which many perspectives have a fair opportunity to be heard and nuances can be appreciated.
That’s exactly what AllSides does. We provide all the tools, facts, and perspectives a reader needs to make an informed decision, so we can discover the truth together.
The digital media space has tried anarchy and tried the ministry of truth approach. Neither has worked. Dictatorships and anarchy are easier to implement than a democratic republic, and seem like attractive solutions — until they fail, and they always do. Free people need something better.
John Gable is the CEO and co-founder of AllSides. He has a Lean Right bias.
Contributors:
Henry A. Brechter, Editor-in-chief (Center bias)
Evan Wagner, News Editor and Product Manager (Lean Left bias)
Julie Mastrine, Director of Marketing and Media Bias Ratings (Lean Right bias)
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