How Crowds Can Save The Internet from Misinformation
There are billions of social media users. With News Detective, there are billions of potential factcheckers too.
By Ilana Strauss, News Detective
As a factchecker at PolitiFact, I factchecked for Facebook and TikTok, where I was one of a small number of factcheckers up against mountains of misinformation we couldn’t possibly hope to check in our lifetimes. And even if we could, do users really want a world where large corporations use a shadowy process to determine what is true?
The same thing that makes the Internet great also makes it messy: No one is in charge. Gone are the days when a small number of trusted newspapers reported what was happening. Today, many people get their news from social media, where a post published by the New York Times looks a lot like a status update from your grandmother. The twentieth century had smaller numbers of trained journalists. The twenty-first century now has billions of untrained ones.
The power of billions of continuous online updates has made the news more available than ever before. This same torrent of information also means that misinformation is just as available. On the flip side, billions of stories, factual or not, are spun up, syndicated, and posted on social media every day, too much for platforms to monitor for accuracy.
Now AI is poised to make misinformation explode.
Ideally, to counter this threat, everyone would learn the media literacy tools that factcheckers like me have been using for over a century to figure out what’s true. But even if everyone did learn to factcheck, who has time to scrutinize everything they come across online?
Well, I have good news: We can use the source of the problem to forge the solution. Crowds created misinformation. And crowds can fix it.
Introducing News Detective: A Wikipedia for Factchecking
Making use of my experience as a factchecker at news outlets and platforms with large audiences and communities, and with incubation support from Hacks/Hackers, MIT DesignX, and MIT Sandbox, I’ve developed News Detective, a platform that uses the power of crowds to factcheck the internet.
News Detective is a lot like a “Wikipedia for factchecking”: Anyone can become a News Detective, while professional factcheckers have been recruited as moderators. These professional moderators make sure community factchecks are accurate, and also teach media literacy techniques to their many users.
News Detective is:
Scalable: There are billions of social media users. With News Detective, there are billions of potential factcheckers too.
Democratic: Anyone can discuss and debate on News Detective. If you disagree with a factcheck, you can post your own. If your research is solid and the community agrees with your interpretation, you win (finally, a way to win arguments online!) Many facts may be black and white, but truth — what those facts mean — should be discussed and considered.
Transparent: Everything about News Detective is public. Anyone can see what the accuracy ratings are, who makes the ratings, and why.
Flexible. Social media platforms can choose to show user ratings, remove questionable posts, or whatever they want.
Accurate: Anyone can contribute, but users have to prove themselves and earn reputation before their factchecks are visible on social media, keeping out trolls.
Our approach is also evidence-based.
For example, in order to help refine our product, News Detective ran a pilot with several journalism classes at the University of Illinois, where we confirmed that regular people — college students with no previous factchecking training — could learn to factcheck on News Detective quickly and effectively. About 100–200 factchecks were completed a week, meaning just this pilot version of News Detective can factcheck as much as a traditional factchecking newsroom. Over 90% of users said they became more media literate. And we’re just getting started.
News Detective assumes we live in a new reality. We aren’t going back to the days where a small number of major outlets determined what was true, and that might be a good thing … As long as we can funnel the raw energy of the internet into something that can regulate itself.
Next, we plan to pilot News Detective on social media platforms. We are also working on ethical AI to make factchecking more efficient without surrendering human judgement. To these ends, we are looking to partner with funders and social media platforms (both very large and very small).
To get in touch, please email ilana@newsdetective.org.
