A few years ago, Bill Maher called the American people stupid. Wolf Blitzer gave him a chance to walk back on his claim. “People are already complaining that you’re calling the United States a stupid country, and I’m giving you a chance to clarify,” Blitzer asked. In response, Maher said, “I don’t need to clarify — it is.”
Maher isn’t completely out of line. According to a national survey conducted by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, only 36 percent of respondents could name all three branches of the U.S. government.
“This survey offers dramatic evidence of the need for more and better civics education,” the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center said in a statement.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Americans are also widely misinformed about how much percentage foreign aid takes up in the federal budget. The average answer by those who were asked in a poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation is 31 percent, but the actual percentage is less than one.
I don’t believe the American people are stupid. Just because you don’t know something doesn’t make you unintelligent, but it does make you uninformed. And yes, the majority of Americans are uninformed.
Considering the lack of knowledge, and the danger it reveals, this leads me to an important question — should social media be fact-checked?
Social media is that crazy medium where people of all stripes and colors — from rainbow flags to black swastikas — can spew whatever comes to their minds. If you’ve ever taken the time to read the comments section of a Facebook post, you know exactly what I am talking about. The post could be about a kitten saved by a firefighter, and someone will inevitably start rampaging about Trump or call Democrats “libtards.”
Now the fact-checking question does not apply to everyday citizens, because that would be an irrational and potentially unconstitutional thing to manage. It applies to celebrities and politicians. The kind of fact-checking I’m suggesting would apply to people with more than a certain amount of followers.
But before I state my position, I want to delve into what Facebook did following the outcry of “fake news” as a result of the Nov. 8 election.
Facebook’s main mechanism for “fake news” oversight is a program that involves third-party fact-checkers. These organizations will fact-check stories that Facebook users marked as fake, and they will decide whether or not to add “disputed by third parties” to the post.
One of the third-party fact-checkers is PolitiFact, which, as some people argue, sometimes appears to favor the left.
Here is an excerpt from The Hill, a conservative-leaning publication, by Cathy Young:
“Last year, PolitiFact gave Donald Trump a ‘pants on fire’ rating for his claim that ‘crime is rising,’ based on government crime data from 1993 to 2014 (which show a steady drop in both violent crime and property crimes).
“In response, the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, pointed to preliminary data from 2015 which do, in fact, show an upward trend in crime statistics.
“But PolitiFact stood by its rating, arguing that Trump’s claim was false since it was made in the context of ‘sweeping rhetoric about a nation in decline’ and did not include such qualifiers as ‘recently’ or ‘in the past year.’”
That’s not fact-checking, it’s nit-picking.
Another point made against Facebook taking up the role as a fact-checker is brought up by Jessica Lessin of The New York Times. She argues that “such editorial power in Facebook’s hands would be unprecedented and dangerous.” Her point is valid. Facebook has the power to mark information as false, even if it may be true. This wouldn’t necessarily be done on purpose, but it could be.
However, Lessin fails to recognize the dangerous aspects of biased news organizations.
A study from Stanford University researchers evaluated middle school students’ and college students’ abilities to assess the validity of information on the internet. The researchers described the results as “dismaying,” “bleak” and “[a] threat to democracy.”
There is no simple answer to whether social media platforms should fact-check. However, if I had to answer, it would be yes. Even though having corporations control the validity of information threatens democracy, so does misinformation. When the president of the United States can claim millions of “illegal immigrants” voted in this election, and have most of his supporters believe that, institutions need to step up.
We already have enough uninformed people in this country. Social media has the power to either encourage or discourage knowledge about our politics. The strength of democracy is the ability to have a debate about the facts. But it is not possible to have democracy where facts are different depending on if you live in red or blue America.
