The most highly trafficked post I ever wrote was about fake news on social media.
I had seen a Martin Luther King Jr. quote going viral on Twitter after the death of Osama Bin Laden: “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” I agreed with the sentiment, but I have a sideline in detecting fake quotes on the internet, and this felt wrong. It didn’t appear on any of his quote pages. It also didn’t appear in any of his writing, as far as I could tell.
The story of the fake turned out to be completely innocent. Someone had offered this, their own thought, followed by a Martin Luther King quote, and the magical power of the internet had somehow mashed them together. Much fake news is, of course, not so benign. So there’s mounting pressure on social media organizations to crack down on this phenomenon. And so Facebook has rolled out a new initiative to make it easier for people to report fake news, and it has tapped a group of fact-checking organizations to help vet the stories.
I’m not against this initiative, exactly. But it does leave me with a version of the question asked by the Roman poet Juvenal: Who will guard the guardians? Who will fact-check the fact-checkers?
The problem, as multiple critics of fact-checkers have pointed out, is that determining what constitutes a “fact” often is not so easy. If I say 42 clowns showed up at my house in Washington this morning and danced the merengue in my front yard, we can be certain that no such thing occurred because 42 clowns could not even stand in my tiny front yard.
But what if I say that my house has lost a great deal of value because of the poor urban management of Mayor Muriel Bowser? That’s a hard claim to evaluate. I have not attempted to sell my home during the administration of Bowser nor did I during the previous administration, so we don’t know what has happened to the price. We could look at sale prices of similar homes, but those will not be an exact match. Moreover, I could retort that I am comparing my home’s value not to what it was worth a few years ago, but to a counterfactual world in which Bowser wasn’t elected.
Policy analysis traffics in these sort of counterfactuals all the time. And that’s the sort of thing fact-checkers are frequently called upon to evaluate.
The currency of politics is what we might call “dubious statements” — things that have some basis in truth but that are spun into better support for one’s cause than the original material really offers. They are not as clearly false as me claiming to be the Queen of Slovenia. But they are biased. Correcting for that bias is a tricky business because the fact-checkers themselves have biases.
Numerous people have argued, correctly in my view, that fact-checking sites share the center-left slant of the mainstream media itself. Dubious statements need to be clarified by context, and fact-checkers often seem to be more generous in providing the context for liberals than for conservatives. Facebook seems to understand this because it apparently intends to confine fact-checks to “very clear-cut falsehoods.” But just how clearly can we cut?
Take the example with which I started. I’m reasonably sure that those words were never recorded in King’s official works. Can I be certain he never said them? Of course not. The man didn’t live his life with a tape recorder running and a transcriptionist standing ready 24/7. It’s possible that I “debunked” a true statement. It is, to be sure, not likely, but it’s possible.
As Vox’s Timothy B. Lee points out, the fact-checkers Facebook is working with “won’t have a ‘half true’ or ‘mostly false’ option. They’re going to have to decide which news stories to rate as fake — thereby branding them as ‘disputed’ in the Facebook newsfeed — and which ones to leave alone.”
And here we reach the ultimate paradox of Juvenal’s epigram. The more narrow the questions to which fact-checkers confine themselves, the less room they will have for their biases to matter, but the more fake news they will leave floating around social media. They can be trustworthy or they can be useful, but they may not be able to manage both. We need guardians, and we cannot entirely trust them. It’s a high-tech version of a problem that has been with us for at least 2,000 years.
Megan McArdle is a Bloomberg View columnist.