Writing for the New York Times Upshot column, Brendan Nyhan claims that research he did with Jason Reifler shows that fact-checking can make a difference in people views. Covering the 2014 election, the research shows that people’s beliefs could be changed.

Here’s the abstract from the research:

Though fact-checking’s prominence has grown in recent years, little is known about public attitudes toward the format or how exposure to it affects the accuracy of people’s
beliefs about controversial political issues. Fact-check readers appear to be better informed than we might otherwise expect, but this inference is limited by the fact
that individuals self-select into fact-checking exposure. During the 2014 campaign, we therefore randomly exposed a representative panel of Americans to receive fact-checking or placebo content over multiple survey waves. Our findings indicate that fact-checking exposure significantly increases the accuracy of people’s beliefs about contested political claims, especially among individuals with high political knowledge. Notably, we find only limited evidence that these effects vary by whether the fact-check is politically congenial to respondents. Our data also indicates that educated and politically sophisticated people are more interested in fact-checking and
that Republicans feel less positively about the practice than Democrats.

It should be noted that these findings are different from research that finds typical backfire effects, where trying to persuade someone with corrective information is often counterproductive.

Just last week, I saw Steve Lewandowsky, author with John Cook of the Debunker’s Handbook, say, in a public forum at Boston University that he wasn’t sure any more whether debunking was an effective tool.

My own belief is that under some conditions, people will certainly change their minds. As of yet, it’s not clear what those conditions are…

Jake Shafer of Politico writes a powerful warning in the midst of the panic over fake news, arguing that the cure for fake news is worse than the disease.

It’s a great article.

Here is some of what he says:

From an economist’s viewpoint, fake news is mostly a demand side problem. If readers weren’t so determined to click sexy headlines that lead them to websites of dubious or unknown reputation, and do it again and again, and often sharing the link, fake news would soon be extinct. But its prevalence indicates that the market is only providing the cheap and stupid thrill some readers desire. Rather than tweaking its algorithms, Facebook might be better off trying to change human nature.

This is what a stupid economist might think — one who still believes the fantasy that human behavior is always rational. That’s crazy talk of course. In reality, we human beings are more reactive than proactive, less able to resist some stimuli in our environment.

The following is an important observation:

Almost every genre of news has been invaded by fake news, but some subject areas appear to be more or less immune to its charms. Fake news about sports or business is extremely rare. Oh, the sports and business pages aren’t fake-free. Hoaxes and baseless rumors get published, but sports and business readers tend to be knowledgeable and discerning about their interests. A fake story about a stock price or a baseball score is quickly resisted by savvy readers who demand that it must be corrected or retracted. They chase down the works of pranksters and hoaxers like white blood cells in pursuit of infectious disease. Fake weather news seems rare, too, for the same reason. The same for fake traffic reports.

So, what makes some information marketplaces subject to fake news and others not so much. This should be a critical target of inquiry for scientists, journalists, and social-media companies… and Truth for Democracy if we can get it off the ground.

Not all fake news fits into this bias pattern, but, in general, the pattern holds. The more outrageous and partisan a fake bundle is, the greater the chance it will be reshared, go viral and break into the mainstream.

Fake news is too important to be left to the Facebook remedy—Mark Zuckerberg is no arbiter of truth.

Of course, fake news is only a small part of the misinformation industrial complex. We need more than a social-media fix.

This article on Vox, by Emmett Rensin on April 21, 2016, argues that liberal elites have become a parody of contempt again working-class citizens who JUST DON’T KNOW ENOUGH.

There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what’s good for them.

In 2016, the smug style has found expression in media and in policy, in the attitudes of liberals both visible and private, providing a foundational set of assumptions above which a great number of liberals comport their understanding of the world.

The trouble is that stupid hicks don’t know what’s good for them. They’re getting conned by right-wingers and tent revivalists until they believe all the lies that’ve made them so wrong. They don’t know any better. That’s why they’re voting against their own self-interest.

The recent election results would seem to put an exclamation on this notion! Clearly, at least half of the country had no idea that the other half was going to rise up and elect a man who doesn’t know much about the world. Doh!

To me, the article does hint at the difficulty of countering the fake-news problem, the dishonesty in public discourse problem. It will NOT be enough to simply tell the truth.

Callum Borchers of the Washington Post writes a nice article about how fake-news creators handle critics of their dark art.

In it he starts with this line:

Throwing criticism back at the critic is perhaps the most basic counterattack in the book…

He goes on to cite such examples as Ron Paul’s Liberty Report and it’s “real fake-news list,” which included a long list of mainstream media types, including folks like Diane Sawyer, George Stephanopoulos, and Wolf Blitzer.

Borchers response to kind of list is the following:

It is perfectly legitimate to criticize the press for underestimating Trump’s candidacy or for failing to demand more evidence before the invasion of Iraq — but it makes no sense to equate these alleged shortcomings with publication of pure fiction.