DIY fact-checking for an election year
Illustration by Marian F. Moratinos
by Karen Fischer
A few weeks ago, I rewatched the 2016 episode of Parts Unknown starring Anthony Bourdain where he visited Manila, the capital of the Philippines. Bourdain narrated throughout one scene of workers saying goodbye to their families at an airport terminal that cash remittances from Filipino workers stationed abroad to family back home constituted as much as 10 percent of the country’s GDP.
This line stuck out to me because I had just wrapped a reporting project on global nursing shortages and international migration among healthcare workers. In fact, one of my sources mentioned in an interview that foreign remittances were a “significant portion” of Filipino GDP specifically, and I had just fact-checked what “significant” exactly meant nowadays.
It turned out that my source’s definition of that word was also based on Bourdain’s statistic of 10 percent, but there was a catch. In 2020, the remittance rate of Filipino workers abroad nose-dived with the COVID-19 pandemic, so by 2021, foreign remittances were less than 1 percent of Filipino GDP.
That’s not to say that the 10 percent figure or sentiment that it was significant was wrong at the time, but without current context, saying the same thing right now is misleading.
But imagine this: You come across a TikTok video with a clip of a man explaining how much money is leaving the U.S. through international remittances. He claims that foreign governments were receiving half of their GDP from U.S.-based workers. Due to that, he is gathering signatures on a petition to promote a bill banning international remittances in Congress. In the video, he is waving his arms, speaking fast, and making this problem feel urgent, like it needs to be solved now. Second by second, the video is shared and the petition receives more signatures.
Fast forward a few days and that bill is being debated in Congress. It is taken seriously, and this petition is proof from key lawmakers that Americans have strong feelings about this issue. A vote comes down, and international remittances are banned even though the core claim of dollars constituting 50 percent of any country’s GDP was never corroborated.
Once you actually look up the man in the video, you realize he’s a talk show host, not an economist or finance analyst or expert. Yet once this video was shared over and over without users checking its claims for accuracy, it was too late and now was going to have an impact on real people.
This theoretical example is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to international concerns about the power of misinformation this year. But it matters. It matters because of the real-life implications of obfuscated truth, of which there are countless examples. It matters because we all have enough to be upset about as it is in our everyday lives — fake stressors and unnecessary divisions in our respective communities are mental health burdens we don’t need.
Approximately 64 countries will elect new leadership in 2024, including Mexico, Ukraine, Venezuela, South Africa, India, the U.K., and the United States. The stakes are high for the Global North and the Global South alike, with states across the spectrum grappling with electing leaders who, in many cases, have advocated to unravel the checks and balances of democratic processes to inch toward autocracy.
With such a pivotal year underway, the World Economic Forum (WEF) declared in January that AI-generated and dispersed misinformation was the greatest short-term global threat to the world. In third place was societal polarization, which is when people lose exposure or casual social connections to those who have differing perspectives. Number five on the WEF’s list is interstate conflicts between border states. The threats even feel linear in nature — one nugget of misinformation may not seem like a big deal on TikTok, but step by step, it can turn up the temperature and boil into a regional war.
Stateside, the 2016 presidential election was the first time that Americans culturally contended with how misinformation campaigns on social media have the capability to change history. With such stakes in mind, the next time you see content that makes your heart pump a little faster, test it for accuracy with a few DIY fact-checking methods that the Poynter Institute recommends in its Fact-checking 101 toolkit before sharing something that may not be factual.
Ask the three golden questions
The Stanford History Education Group studied professional fact-checkers and found that three key questions were the ticket to debunking the majority of claims online — and preventing their spread:
Who created this claim? Content can be shared millions of times, so the focus isn’t on the person sharing a claim, but who created it in the first place. Click on their profile to see if the original creator is a journalist, expert, or legal authority with topical expertise. A few clicks searching for that name is also helpful to get a greater sense of their background.
Is there evidence? Journalists painstakingly work to hyperlink, fact-check, and include sources to back up their claims in writing. If there are no concrete sources in the content you’re reviewing, like quotes from interviews or links to supporting documentation, you may be looking at misinformation. Pro tip: Click through hyperlinks to double-check what creators link as their facts. Sometimes, the devil can be in those details.
What are other experts saying? When there is a new discovery, media and news organizations typically move to cover it at the speed of light. If you’re coming across the type of claim that’s raising your blood pressure, others will be talking about it, too. Quickly search the issue and see if others have commented on the claim you’ve found. If yes, it’s likely that this is truthful because it’s something that a wider community is talking about.
Marian F. Moratinos
Read laterally
Reading laterally is something that journalists do all the time to check if the first search result that matches a key phrase is the best source to speak to a topic. If a search of your claim comes back with a few unknown outlets at the top, open the first handful of search results across different tabs. From there, click into the first link and open another tab on the publisher’s “About” page, or search the name of the publisher in a fresh tab.
This may sound like a lot of work, but opening up a whole bunch of tabs and parsing through them is quicker than you may think. You can find out in seconds if an organization is biased or simply not an expert in the field related to the claim they’re making. Pro tip: If you get a fishy feeling about an organization and their website says that they’re a nonprofit, for example, look over their About page to see who funds the organization. Donors can sometimes influence the perspective that an organization has, which can impact credibility.
After a while, you’re going to get the hang of clicking not the first few results that pop up for a search, but knowing how to scan down the results page to see if a claim is generally backed by credible sources.
Inspect for deepfakes
Deepfakes may seem like they’re a far cry from your casual scrolling, but they’re becoming more and more common and even resulting in massive financial scams of millions of dollars.
First: If you come across a video or photo of a public figure that you have some background on, but they’re doing something that seems out of character, acknowledge your skepticism.
Take your investigation a step further by checking a few key areas. Computer-generated versions of real people are missing all-too-human quirks that actual people have. For example, dead giveaways for deepfakes of famous figures in videos are when they do not:
Seem to be blinking
Have flyaways in their hair
Have clear separations between teeth
Have a skin tone that looks natural
Pro tip: Another tool out there is Deepware, which allows you to drag and drop content online into a search bar. The software will scan the image or video for the presence of an existing deep ake.
When in doubt, don’t share
If you spend that extra minute or two fact-checking a post and realize that there’s a likelihood that it’s misinformation, don’t share it. Report it as misinformation on the platform if you think it might be, and keep moving along. If you start getting into the habit of fact-checking your social feeds, it’s worth it to share your newfound tactics with friends and family.
Communities around the globe are concerned about misinformation and the manipulation of emotions online because it has real-life consequences. That all starts and ends with you as a user and how you interact with the content that comes across your path. Be cautious, fact-check what you can, and remember the power that a single like or share may have.
Editor’s note: This story was written before Ukraine’s 2024 election date, which was called off due to the ongoing war.