Fact-Checking

an interview with Peter Adams

Peter Adams is the Senior Vice President of Research and Design at the News Literacy Project (NLP).

Hi! Tell us about your background and and your work.

My primary background is in education and student media. I have taught students from 7th grade to the college level. I joined the NLP in the very early days of the organization and helped teachers in middle schools and high schools integrate news literacy into their classrooms. I also got to work closely with a lot of journalists who volunteered with us. I peppered them with questions: about how their newsrooms operate; about journalism standards and ethics; about things they think the press could do better; and about aspects of their job that they felt were commonly misunderstood by the public. I also got to spend time in lots of different newsrooms in Chicago and elsewhere. I learned a tremendous amount.

What is the first thing we should do if we come across a claim and are not sure if it’s true?

Do a web search for the claim and hold off liking or sharing it on social media. When you do this, often you’ll either see the claim validated by known, high-quality sources or you’ll see it debunked or draw into question by standards-based fact checking organizations.

Could you walk us through a simple example of fact-checking a claim?

Absolutely – in fact, I’ll describe a couple just to illustrate some key points.

I’m not on Facebook a lot, but when I am I tend to see a lot of dubious claims that I’m immediately skeptical of – mostly from people I went to high school with or knew in college. They come from both liberals and conservatives, and are about a pretty wide variety of topics. However, there are some throughlines and patterns that people can learn to recognize and be wary of. Recently, I saw two different posts from different people that both immediately set off my misinformation spidey senses.

One made the outrageous claim that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went “from a broke bartender to a net worth of $29 million in less than 6 years” and that this “tells you all you need to know.” If that were true, it would be pretty suspicious and even outrageous – but I’ve seen posts for years and years that wildly exaggerate or outright fabricate net worth amounts for prominent politicians. So I knew to be skeptical. All it took to debunk the claim was a simple web search, which turned up several fact-check reports that not only labeled it false, they explained why and linked to financial disclosure reports. According to all available information, AOC’s net worth is actually quite modest.

But people in the replies didn’t know this. They were mad! So I posted a polite, impartial statement there to warn others who might encounter this after me that this isn’t actually true.

A minute or two later, I saw a post from someone else claiming that President Trump “refuses to hang and have an unveiling for” former President Obama’s official portrait. The post also called Trump “petty” and said everyone should share the image of the portrait to get back at him. Red flags all over the place! Like the other claim, this is outrageous and designed to enflame people’s political biases. It also encourages people to spread the post, which is a common tactic that malicious actors use online.

Again, all it took was a quick web search to get the facts: this was during Obama’s first term, and it was mutual: neither Obama nor Trump wanted to do the unveiling, so they didn’t. But that didn’t stop people in the comments from unloading all of their negative thoughts and feelings about Trump in response. I posted another polite, impartial message to warn others about this falsehood.

Are there specific websites you recommend for checking whether a claim is true?

There are quite a few really high-quality fact-checking sites that do a great job of getting to the bottom of viral claims that circulate on social media. People love to hate “fact-checkers” and dismiss them as “biased,” but in my view this is just a way to try to discredit them or to avoid dealing with facts that complicate our existing beliefs and ideas. No one likes to be fact-checked or told something they really, really hope is true – or even feel strongly must be true – is false.

There is an association of fact-checking organizations called the International Fact Checking Network that has a code of principles that all its members sign. That’s a great place to browse for high-quality fact-checking sites, but a few that I think do great work include AFP (Agence-France Presse) Fact Check, PolitiFact, Lead Stories and Reuters fact checking division.

How can we judge the reliability of a website or news outlet?

Well, first I think everyone needs to really reflect on the concept of “credibility” and think through what really makes a piece of information or a source of information credible. Is it perfection? Sources that have never made an error of fact? No, of course not – that’s such a high standard that you’d wind up being unable to trust every single information source on the planet. Is it sources that only publish things that feel good and confirm your biases? Sources that cater to and confirm your existing ideas and beliefs about the world? No, of course not.

Okay so what does credibility look like, then? What are its characteristics? Well, two of those characteristics are certainly accuracy and fairness.

Credible sources don’t:

• make things up.
• take people’s words out of context.
• misrepresent photos.
• use loaded language.
• exclude important voices and perspectives.

Credible sources are:

• transparent. Sources you trust should explain exactly how they verified what they’re reporting.
• committed to independence, honesty and the public’s interest. Credible sources strive to ensure that the information they provide is not influenced by the interests of third parties like advertisers or political parties.
• accountable. Accountability demonstrates their commitment to the truth. They acknowledge lapses in standards and ethics, and seek to address them: they correct errors when they happen; they update headlines that miss the mark; they take steps to explain their decisions to the public.

The more of these kinds of things you see from a source, the more credible you should consider it.

Can AI help us with fact-checking?

Yes. Algorithmically driven technologies that preceded generative AI – such as photo manipulation detection software and reverse image search features – have become absolutely essential to fact-checkers who debunk viral misinformation. Exactly how generative AI can be used to help with fact-checking and other counter-misinformation measures is still an open question, but there’s certainly enormous potential for it to help people know when they’re seeing something false or misleading.

For example, social media platforms (back when more of them genuinely cared about stopping the flow of harmful falsehoods on their platforms) have always struggled with detecting misinformation and deploying labels or other warnings at scale – but this is exactly the kind of thing that AI is good at. An AI that is trained on a large body of published fact-checks and known examples of viral misinformation could dramatically reduce the spread and influence of falsehoods in our feeds.

It’s hard to tell who’s a real expert online. What clues can we use to decide whether someone is a relevant expert?

This can be tricky – particularly with health and wellness issues. In general, we seek the opinions and insights of experts about complex topics that are hard for non-experts to understand. But this can also make it hard to evaluate who is a genuine expert and who is pretending to have more expertise than they actually do. In other words, if we don’t know enough about a specialized subject to answer our own questions about it, we often also don’t know enough to judge the credibility of people who claim to be experts.

My main advice here is the same as checking a claim you see online: do a web search (in this case, for the person’s name). If they’re affiliated with a reputable organization – for example, an accredited university – and their bio says they study the subject(s) they’re posting about online, then you can pretty safely assume they’re an expert.

But it’s also important to check if experts as a group have formed a consensus opinion about a specific subject or question. There are some highly credentialed experts who sometimes express skepticism about the causes of climate change, for example, but they are in the extreme minority because 99% of credentialed climate scientists agree that human activities are the primary cause. So credentials matter a lot, but expert consensus matters even more.

What questions should we ask ourselves when we see statistical claims online?

As with any fact-based statements we see from unfamiliar or unreliable sources online, we first need to check that they’re actually true. Malicious actors often fabricate statistics (remember the AOC net worth example I gave above?) because they know statistics feel authoritative and can convince people.

Another top question you should ask is … where did this statistic come from? If there’s no source cited for the statistic, that’s a red flag – and you should do a web search for the stat. If there is a source cited, that’s good – but you still need to confirm that the source is reputable and reliable. A lot of highly partisan or even propagandistic organizations publish statistics that are either false or highly misleading.

Why is it important to trace a piece of information back to its original source, and how do we do that?

Because that’s one of the only ways to really judge the accuracy of it. As I mentioned above regarding statistics – even if you confirm that it’s a genuine statistic, you still need to know whether the underlying study is methodologically sound and the figure is being presented in context.

The same goes for supposed quotes of public figures, or claims about photos and video. Just because someone on the internet shows you a photo or video, it doesn’t mean what they tell you about it is at all accurate. You have to find that photo or video on a website that has standards for accuracy, and check the caption to see where it originated. Then you can double-check that attribution if you feel you need to.

For example, if you use a reverse image search and find a viral photo in a standards-based news report from, say, USA Today, and you look at the photo credit which says it came from Getty Images. This is almost certainly true, but you could then find it on Getty’s website to confirm what it shows and when it was taken.

That’s not to suggest that USA Today would ever lie about or intentionally misrepresent what a photo shows – that wouldn’t make any sense for them to do because it would completely backfire. (In general, it’s extremely rare for a standards-based news organization to miscaption a photo or video even by accident.) But there are lots of people on the internet who intentionally do this kind of thing – so it’s always important to check when it’s user-generated content.

Are there any common mistakes people make when "researching" things online that we should be aware of?

Absolutely. First, I think too many people aren’t careful with their search results and just click on one of the first links without really scrutinizing their results and scanning down for a known credible source.

Second, I would say that people generally aren’t aware enough of their own cognitive biases. For example, we’re all vulnerable to something called confirmation bias which causes us to seek information that confirms or is consistent with our existing ideas and beliefs – and to avoid or invent ways to discredit information that complicates or conflicts with those beliefs. These instincts aren’t always wrong, but we all need to be aware that our brains are hard-wired to protect our prior convictions and sometimes we have to fight against that.

Third, I would say, is intellectual humility and self-honesty. To do good online research, we have to acknowledge our own limitations and lack of understanding, and to seek answers honestly … even when we don’t like what we find.

And finally, people are generally way too cynical. It’s clearly true that there are a lot of websites and social media accounts that intentionally mislead and publish information in pursuit of an undisclosed motive (a motive other than honestly informing the public). But a lot of people assume that all sources of information have secret motives and intentional biases, and that’s not only not true, it’s an extremely disempowering position to take. There really are sources of news and other information that are genuinely trying to be accurate, fair, honest, independent and accountable. We just have to learn to recognize them.

Learn More

You can connect with Peter on Bluesky or X. To learn more about the News Literacy Project, visit their website or follow them on Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Bluesky, and X.

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Critikid is building a mock social media feed to give kids a chance to practice spotting misinformation, clickbait, and logical fallacies in a safe and controlled environment before they face the real thing. Learn more.

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