Good News: The Average Person Can Spot A Fake News Source.
While disinformation may seem like an impossible problem, a recent study suggests that most people know who to distrust.
Researchers at MIT and the University of Regina asked almost 2,000 laypeople to rate the reliability of 60 news sources and then compared their judgments with professional fact-checkers. The result: average people are really good at identifying unreliable news outlets.
While there was a bit of partisan disagreement about which sources were the most reliable, there was bipartisan consensus about which sources are generally trustworthy and which were consistently biased. Notably, neither democrats nor republicans trusted hyper-partisan or fake news websites, regardless of the sources’ political bias.
To many who are fighting misinformation, the study comes as a relief. It’s good to know the public is generally aware of which sources consistently publish slanted content. But the research team makes no claims about how easily newsreaders recognize bogus content as they consume it. So if a usually reliable source publishes a story overflowing with fallacies, many readers might not spot them. We still need a way for people to work together to identify misleading content and notify others.
Together We Can
With elections coming up and misinformation on the rise, it’s reassuring that the average person knows who to trust. But many people aren’t average. And when their biases lead them to trust unreliable reporting, misinformation can go viral.
Fortunately, there is hope. With new tools, we can put our heads together and be more resilient against misinformation. The authors note: “using crowdsourced trust ratings to gain information about media outlet reliability — information that can help inform ranking algorithms — shows promise.” Working together, we can prevent biased outliers from derailing our collective conversations.
Our Solution
Public Editor was built around this big idea: people, thinking together, can make judgments about articles as accurately as experts. How do we organize that? We provide online training and guiding interfaces for volunteers who identify specific reasoning errors in news articles. And we bring it all together with open source algorithms and labels so everyone can see our work. Learn More
We’re recruiting a community of citizen scientists to help us identify misinformation and share our consensus with daily newsreaders. Care to join us?
