Fact checking organizations have gained a lot of attention over the recent election cycle. In fact, Facebook recently announced that Snopes.com was going to be a part of their large effort to weed out fake news stories.
As media and the public become more dependent on fact checkers to sort through the muck of modern politics, it becomes increasingly important to ask this question about the fact checkers themselves: Are they trustworthy?
If you’ve been putting your hopes in these sites, you may want to sit down before reading more.
Politifact
If you followed the election closely this year, you probably saw a slew of Politifact references relating to every debate, speech and rally. You may also have felt a sinking suspicion that the organization wasn’t exactly playing fair.
As it turns out, George Mason University ran an empirical study on Politifact, and the results are exactly what you might suspect. Politifact has shown a four to one bias in favor of Democrats.
A second study further incriminated the site by showing that roughly 30 percent of Politifact’s truth ratings are arguably incorrect or rooted in opinion. Overall, scientific research has shown that the site is an unreliable resource that pushes a political agenda.
Putting the claims of Politifact to the test better highlight just how serious the issue is. Here are a few examples of times Republicans were rated as being untruthful when they were in fact 100 percent correct:
- Michele Bachmann was rated as “pants on fire” when claiming the IRS was targeting conservatives.
- Mike Pence was rated “pants on fire” when claiming to be a creationist.And here are a few examples of questionable true ratings:
- Obama was rated as completely true when he said there is absolutely no kind of gun registry in the U.S.
- A statement claiming it is easier to buy a gun than a Happy Meal in California was rated as true.These are specific examples, but they show that Politifact is willing to rate statements completely incorrectly, and they often never revisit the ratings, even when they are shown to be wrong.
A second trend, that is probably worse, is that they often take “common knowledge” facts at face value without investigating. To claim a person is “false” when they don’t subscribe to aspects of evolutionary theory is inane. Personal beliefs can’t really be fact checked.
Even worse, when fact checking political debates and similar events, they have shown a propensity to cherry pick the statements they review, making it easy to paint a picture of one side being more trustworthy than the other, even though the bulk of “untrue” Republican statements they target are opinions, unverifiable claims or flat out wrong.
Snopes
Politifact has demonstrated their bias fairly openly. That a scientific study was able to confirm it is hardly surprising. Snopes, on the other hand, has managed to maintain a much better reputation. Unfortunately, recent scrutiny has put them under the microscope, and while they are not as flagrantly biased as Politifact, the findings are still disturbing.
In the light of a divorce between the founding members, several investigative journalists have dug up dirt suggesting the Snopes has defrauded and attacked websites for personal agendas. The founders have discretely refused to comment on the situation, but that led to an additional revelation.
Snopes has virtually no transparency on their fact checking methodology. About the only thing they have admitted is that checking facts is often done by a team, rather than an individual. The problem arises when it is noted that team members are never cited for their work. While this could be construed as laziness, it shows a complete lack of accountability.
For fact checking, especially in political arenas, it is inevitable that bias might slip into the work of an individual. A team can compensate by matching opposing representation to clash until the truth can emerge. It’s an old idea that has proven successful over the ages, but Snopes has shown no commitment to upholding the ideal.
Since no one outside of the company knows who is actually checking the facts, there is no accountability. If Snopes were to face a study similar to the one run on Politifact, there is no telling what might emerge.
Drawing Conclusions
The idea of being able to go to a high-profile website and have experts sift through the quagmire of half-truths and falsehoods of the world for you is appealing. Unfortunately, the sites that have tried to provide this are just as susceptible to bias and failure as any human endeavor. The unreliability of these sites ranges from outright malice to complete unknowns, so you should probably take their words with a grain of salt, if at all.
Regards,
Ethan Warrick
Editor
Wealth Authority
