It is April 1 which means the news consumer must be extra aware for hijinks, tomfoolery, and other assortments of fake news. While some may have great fun with tales of pitchers who can throw 168 mile an hour fastballs while wearing a hiking boot on one foot and being barefoot on the other, the fact-checkers that are part of Facebook’s anti-disinformation campaign may beg to differ.
Facebook’s program of third-party fact-checkers exists, so they tell us, to prevent the spread of fake news and disinformation, to save democracy, and hold the liars, spinsters, exaggerators, and satirists accountable. On this April Fool’s Day, we have collected a series of headlines from Facebook’s fact-checking partners at PolitiFact, USA Today, AP, Factcheck.org, Reuters, AFP, and Lead Stories from the first three months of 2024. Your task is to go through the following test and pick the real, democracy-saving headline from the one that we made up.
How did you do? Did you help save democracy? On a more serious note, the thing about conspiracy theorists is that fact-checking websites will not convince them that they are wrong. Instead, if a fact-checker claims the conspiracy is false, the theorist will claim that is just proof that the conspiracy is true because “that’s just what they want you to believe” or “that’s just what somebody who is in on it would say,” so even the most obvious fact-checks that 99 percent of people agree with, do not actually help combat fake news, but they might help perpetuate it by playing to the conspiracy theorist’s paranoia and sense of possessing some bit of forbidden knowledge.
