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10 Questions for Fact-Checking Social Media and the News

When social media no longer provides fact-checking, learn to do it yourself.

Key points

  • Social media and some news outlets often include false information which can feel true from repetition.
  • Research shows that false and emotional information spreads farther and faster than the truth.
  • Asking yourself the ten questions provided in this blog can help you more accurately determine the truth.

With social media no longer providing fact-checking and content moderation, everyone needs to learn how to spot false information on their own and avoid repeating it. While most major media (television networks and national newspapers) tend to verify their information from two or three sources before publishing it, there are many news sources with a partisan tilt and little or no fact-checking. However, doing your own fact-checking doesn’t have to be complicated. This blog offers ten questions you can ask yourself before absorbing anything you see online or in print.

Fox_Ana/Shutterstock
Source: Fox_Ana/Shutterstock

False and Emotional News

First, it’s important to know that repeating information with an emotional appeal makes it appear more credible. This is called the illusory truth effect. This means that something you see or hear a lot on social media (or anywhere) will feel more and more true even when it is totally false.1

Also, research shows that false information travels farther and faster than the truth.

“The top 1 percent of false news cascades diffused to between 1,000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1,000 people," according to researchers. "Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.”2

In other words, what grabs you emotionally may be exactly what you should not repeat, to avoid adding to the spread of fake news.

The Bully’s Story

Several of the ten questions below refer to the Bully’s Story (also known as the Fantasy Crisis Triad) that is often involved in false stories that get you emotionally hooked (such as conspiracy theories): 1) There is a terrible crisis triggering a deep fear within you; 2) The crisis is caused by an evil villain, which should activate your rage; and 3) There is a superhero (often a bully with a domineering Cluster B personality in reality) who will solve the crisis and vanquish the villain in short order. These three elements are usually false and often a complete fantasy promoted by the speaker or writer of the news item in order to gain power or money. Yet the combination of these three factors tends to hook our primitive emotions of fear, rage, and love/loyalty without us even realizing it. This is the primitive emotional power that most bullies use to immobilize their listeners or to mobilize them against their other targets. Therefore, we need to consciously watch out for these three emotional triggers when we analyze the news from any source.3

Ten Questions for Fake News Analysis4

  1. Is this really true? Is this really a crisis?

  2. What is the context? Is this information common or an outlier?

  3. What are the numbers/statistics on this? Is there research to look at?

  4. Do most experts agree? Why or why not?

  5. Does this come from a credible news source?

  6. What do other news sources say about this?

  7. Is the person or group being blamed really a villain? Are they even connected in any way to this problem?

  8. Is the person speaking or writing about the alleged crisis really a hero?

  9. Will the speaker/writer personally benefit by saying what they are saying, often reducing its credibility?

  10. How likely is it that blaming others is really a projection of what the speaker/writer is actually saying or doing?

Asking these questions slows us down and gets us thinking rather than reacting. It is common knowledge that when we react strongly, it makes it harder for us to think logically. One thing the internet has done is shortened everyone’s attention span, which makes it harder for us to reflect on what we are hearing. Instead, it can slip emotionally into our brains without being logically analyzed.

Written vs. Face and Voice News

We generally take in written news through the left hemisphere of the brain, where we primarily process language and analyze things. The non-verbal emotions of our faces and voices tend to be processed more by our right brains with little or no analysis. When our level of emotional arousal becomes intense, the left hemisphere goes offline and the right hemisphere dominates.5

Any information that we receive from electronic media tends to involve voices (radio, television, movies) and faces (social media, TV, movies) that are repeated thousands and millions of times—and get directly absorbed by our brains without thoughtful processing. This may explain why different groups can have such different opinions on the same subjects. They have listened to or watched different select sources of face and voice news, which have had a powerful emotional impact on them. Then, they repeat the same information within their group, producing emotional contagion, which intensifies the most aggressive thinking within the group. This is why news “silos” (where people only listen to and watch one “side” of the news) contribute so much to polarization, even though we don’t disagree as much when we have the same full information. The way to avoid such unnecessary polarization is to have several sources of news, including some that are written.

Conclusion

It would be great if these pointed questions and the resulting answers were the kinds of information we received regularly rather than the high-emotion “breaking” news that simply grabs our amygdala to get our attention and then stresses us out. We actually have a choice and can do our own analysis. It also gets us thinking with our left hemisphere, rather than just reacting emotionally with our right brain without question. By asking ourselves these ten questions, we can get a much better idea of the accuracy of the information we are taking in from social media or any source.

References

1. Aumyo Hassan and Sarah J. Barber (2021). “The Effects of Repetition Frequency on the Illusory Truth Effect,” Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 6, no. 38, 1. http://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-021-00301-5.

2. Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy and Sinan Aral, “The spread of true and false news online,” Science, May 9, 2018, 1146-1141, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6380/1146.

3. Bill Eddy (2024). Our New World of Adult Bullies: How to Spot Them – How to Stop Them. Health Communications, Inc., 75-77.

4. Bill Eddy (2019). Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths—And How We Can Stop! Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 164-165.

5. Allan N. Schore (2019). Right Brain Psychotherapy. W. W. Norton, 220.

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