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LA wildfires disinformation reveals limits of fact-checking
Meta is ditching its fact-checking initiative — but is it really working for us anyway?
Fact-checking is meant to provide a response to misinformation (ie, inadvertently sharing false information), but it doesn’t really offer an answer to the problem of disinformation, which involves deliberate efforts to deceive, mislead, and/or manipulate. Fact-checking relies on an assumption that people engage with and process information in a generally rational, objective manner, yet research shows that this simply is not the case, particularly when we are talking about viral rumors and weaponized narratives on social media. I think most people know this, but there seems to be a hesitance to want to really change our approach to confronting disinformation to reflect this new reality, likely because doing so will require us to grapple with the same types of complexities, contradictions, and uncertainties that make us susceptible to believing falsehoods — and resistant to correcting them — in the first place.
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