Factual Claims Research Articles

De- and recoding algorithmic systems: The case of fact checkers and fact checked users

With the recent development of debunking on social media as a dominant agenda, fact checkers have increasingly used machine learning (ML) to identify, verify and correct factual claims, as ML promises the scaling of fact checking practices. However, it also places a new actor in between the fact checkers and the fact checked users. In this paper, we conducted a contrasted analysis of how fact checkers and fact checked users understand, evaluate and act towards the algorithmic system and the data flows in Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program: We did ethnographic fieldwork in the fact checking newsroom and interviewed and did protocol analysis with the fact checked. For both professional users and end users, the algorithmic system is experienced as a black box in which they have limited insight, and their sense-making practices happen based on the data and metrics that are made visible to them. In the paper, we draw on and expanded theory on decoding algorithms by not only exploring how the two user groups engage in decoding the algorithmic system, but also actively engage in forms of recoding by attempting to adapt or modify the algorithmic system to better fit within their cultural and social context, which is characterised by both varying epistemic cultures and societal positions. While the fact checkers from their hegemonic (sometimes negotiated) position understand the program as a (sometimes stupid) tool and primarily engage in passive acts of recoding, fact checked users, from their oppositional position, understand the program as an unpredictable censoring machine and engage primarily in more active acts of recoding. Based on the analysis, we end the paper with a discussion in which we argued for understanding data reflexivity as highly relational and processual.

And That’s a Fact: A Rhetorical Perspective on the Role of Fact-Checkers

ABSTRACT Fact-checking initiatives have rapidly expanded worldwide with the overall aim of assessing the veracity of factual claims made in public. In this paper, we critique how the objectivity norm informs the current role perception of fact-checkers and suggest ways to reinterpret this perception through rhetorical argumentation theory. First, we point to research literature on fact-checking as a site in which role perceptions of fact-checkers and epistemological ideals are represented, (re)created and contested, marking out an objectivist role perception. Second, we highlight recent contributions from scholars who, like us, have noticed tensions between the objectivist role perception and role performances of fact-checkers and constructively recommended different ways of working around these tensions. In dialogue with these suggestions, we propose that rhetorical argumentation theory can be considered a supplementary resource to further advance epistemological discussions on the role perception of fact-checkers. In addition, the vocabulary from rhetorical argumentation theory holds potential for methodological operationalisation to guide the future role performances of fact-checkers. Finally, to develop our suggestion further, we propose a new research agenda embracing action-oriented research as an integrated way of developing fact-checkers’ role and practise together with practitioners.

Does public justification face an ‘expert problem’? Some thoughts in light of the COVID-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT Policies are often justified to the public with reference to factual claims that most people cannot easily verify or scrutinise because they lack relevant knowledge or expertise. This poses a challenge for theories of public justification which require that laws are justified using reasons that all can accept. Further difficulties arise in cases such as the response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic where the factual base of knowledge used to justify policies is limited, subject to a high degree of disagreement amongst experts, and marked by rapid changes. This paper reviews some strategies that public justification theorists might draw on to address the question of how to justify policies that depend on this kind of expert knowledge. Whilst such strategies cohere with existing theories of public justification, they do not yield intuitively attractive recommendations. Ideally, theories of public justification would provide criteria by which to evaluate expert testimony such that it guides and informs, but does not lead, policy making. However, in cases like the pandemic response, theories of public reason currently tend towards recommendations that are intuitively unattractive: either requiring citizens to defer to ‘experts’ in a fairly uncritical way or being overly permissive of most factual claims.

We Dislike Them, so They Lie: Partisan Bias in Perception of Accuracy of Factual Claims

The aim of this paper is to investigate how and to what extent partisan bias affects the perceived accuracy of factual claims made by politicians in Slovakia. In our research, respondents (N = 122) were asked to create their own ranking of the credibility of politicians. The respondents were later asked to estimate the average factual accuracy of the most trusted, moderately trusted, and least trusted politicians. Data from the non-partisan fact-check project Demagog.SK was used as the baseline data for testing the actual factual accuracy of politicians. This survey experiment also tests the effect of anchoring. The results suggest no positive partisan bias, and, hence, the absence of partisan favoritism. The study shows that people tend to believe that politicians use of false claims disproportionately more often than in reality

Mapping the urban heritage environment : An explorative case study of the entrepreneurial culture of Hyderabad Sindh, Pakistan

This paper delves into a location’s historiography to learn more about communities and practices that have contributed to the heritage environment, some of which has been degraded as a result of rapid expansion, megacity migration and failure to conserve the built and cultural heritage. Because of its deep and rich urban historical background, the city of Hyderabad, located in the southern province of Pakistan, was chosen as a case study. The professional communities of Sindh, which once played a vital role in the city’s splendour, as well as the region’s rich culture and economy, are of particular interest in this paper. The analysis adopted an exploratory approach to explore historicity to achieve and preserve its long-term viability, which included engaging with the people who live in those areas. This research explored the rich connections between geography, history and emotions associated with any location, and explains how mapping aids in understanding different elements through their various dimensions. According to the findings of this paper, history as an exploratory tool has the potential to play a transformative role in Hyderabad city, boosting economic development, creativity and improving the efficiency of the historic built environment. The findings of this study inform that in view of its historicity, the socioeconomic aspect of Hyderabad city has significantly generated unique trading trends, society and spaces that provide a ‘sense of place’. Five key elements of the historicity framework developed in this paper include: offshoots of old patterns with revised strategies; designing user-friendly spaces that denote true, authentic and factual claims about the past; regenerating the place using its local products as heritage environments; adopting the historic urban landscapes (HUL) approach as a tool to explore for revitalising heritage; and developing integrated planning.

Entering an Information Era of Parallel Truths? A Qualitative Analysis of Legitimizing and De-legitimizing Truth Claims in Established Versus Alternative Media Outlets

In today’s digital media ecology, alternative narratives and conspiracies spread rapidly, and may undermine the legitimacy of journalism and reinforce polarized divides in society. In this setting, constructions of truth may greatly vary across established and alternative media. In this paper, we use a comparative qualitative content analysis in the US and the Netherlands to offer in-depth insights into how factual claims are legitimized and delegitimized by alternative versus mainstream media outlets. We put the assumption of post-factual relativism and alternative truths to an empirical test: To what extent and how do alternative versus established media construct irreconcilable versions of reality? When political disagreement is no longer founded on a shared reality, representative democracy may be severely damaged and vulnerable to undermining discourses of untruthfulness.

Fast Facts: Platforms From Personalization to Centralization

In recent years, there has been a noticeable shift in the economies of search and information retrieval concerning how the products of giant platform companies consolidate and represent facts directly in their search results. Concomitantly, media, communication, and information scholars have recently refocused on how media technology companies variably create, collect, connect, and commercialize data related to facts about the world and how such processes have implications for how we know the world. Such approaches often counter popular narratives that seek to frame the problems of platforms in terms of personalization and personalized content. While research on the personalization afforded by media is widespread, platforms also engage in the centralization of facts by merging web data representing factual claims and offering answers directly in search engines and virtual assistants’ results and responses (what we refer to as “fast facts”). These processes considerably affect how knowledge is constructed and shared in a networked society. This special issue collects empirical investigative research on the platformization, exploitation, and centralization of facts while offering a variety of perspectives from which to study these developments, including semantic and infrastructural techniques. This article provides an overview of this field and contextualizes recent media studies on search and information retrieval in broader debates around facts and truth claims.

Disagreeing with Experts

ABSTRACT This paper addresses the question of who should be trusted as an expert and when, particularly in the context of public deliberation. Trust in experts is crucial in making decisions about public policies that involve complex information beyond the expertise of most people. However, fruitful deliberation also requires being able to resist misinformation campaigns, no matter how widespread these might be; being able, in general, to evaluate the evidence at our disposal and form our own opinions. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on this apparent tension between epistemic deference and epistemic independence. The paper has two goals. First, it aims at providing a more nuanced understanding of the question of who should be trusted as an expert by examining cases in which seemingly factual claims are made in public settings by experts. Second, it emphasizes the need to pay attention to the conditions under which we actually trust each other. We suggest that fostering trust in science may be better approached by modifying the conditions under which scientific dialogue takes place, rather than trying to convince the public to trust experts, or blaming them for not doing so.

Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books: Continuities of Reading in the English Reformation

Sixteenth-Century Readers, Fifteenth-Century Books: Continuities of Reading in the English Reformation

Engagement with fact-checked posts on Reddit.

Contested factual claims shared online are of increasing interest to scholars and the public. Characterizing temporal patterns of sharing and engagement with such information, as well as the effect of sharing associated fact-checks, can help us understand the online political news environment more fully. Here, we investigate differential engagement with fact-checked posts shared online via Reddit from 2016 to 2018. The data comprise ∼29,000 conversations, ∼849,000 users, and ∼9.8 million comments. We classified the veracity of the posts being discussed as true, mixed, or false using three fact-checking organizations. Regardless of veracity, fact-checked posts had larger and longer lasting conversations than claims that were not fact-checked. Among those that were fact-checked, posts rated as false were discussed less and for shorter periods of time than claims that were rated as true. We also observe that fact-checks of posts rated as false tend to happen more quickly than fact-checks of posts rated as true. Finally, we observe that thread deletion and removal are systematically related to the presence of a fact-check and the veracity of the fact-check, but when deletion and removal are combined the differences are minimal. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Rationality (Online Discussions/Discussion Quality)

Rationality (Online Discussions/Discussion Quality)

Assessing the Potential of Partisan Group Cues in Promoting Accurate Beliefs

ABSTRACT Recent work on misinformation has indicated a role for social and group-based factors in shaping people’s beliefs on factual matters, suggesting that communicators might be able to leverage social cues in messages aimed at promoting more accurate beliefs. To test this possibility, we conducted an online experiment (N = 605) to assess whether partisan in-group cues across several factual claims are effective in either promoting more accurate beliefs independently or in reinforcing the effect of fact-checking messages. Results reveal that while factual messages consistently promote accurate beliefs, partisan in-group cues have neither a direct effect in promoting greater belief accuracy nor moderate the influence of factual messages. We discuss the implications of the results for theory and offer some practical implications.

Review: Le Complotisme Protestant Contemporain: A propos d’une thèse sur la tribu de Dan (Contemporary Protestant Conspiracy Theories: Concerning a Thesis on the Tribe of Dan), by Christophe Colera

This book performs a rhetorical analysis of the website “Mystery, Babylon The Great: Catholic or Jewish?” (https://watch.pairsite.com/mystery-babylon.html) as part of a sociological investigation of the nature of conspiracy arguments. Christophe Colera positions his argument as a sociological one both by noting the political implications of such arguments—he credits them with a role in the election of President Donald Trump—and by situating it as an element of a social “field” in the sense that the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu proposed it. The introduction provides rationales for a sociologist following the lead of Max Weber to study an obscure website with spurious factual claims and undetermined authorship. There is no evidence apart from the website itself of either “Barbara Aho” or her husband, credited as its authors. They may simply be another fictive element among the imaginings that drive the website’s narrative.Colera is particularly interested in how a born-again Christian applies esoteric literature, such as the writings of Helena Blavatsky and Aleister Crowley, at face value to construct their conspiracy theory. As such, Colera sees the website not only as an opportunity to examine the “doxa” that underlies various YouTube videos that present current events as revealing the Devil’s handiwork, but also, and more tentatively, as a way of understanding the claims of esoteric literature by seeing what they look like when inverted from their original function as writings opposed to Christianity to tools for a born-again Christian to construct secular history as diabolical history.The bulk of the book is a detailed exegesis of the website, which presents an apocalyptic historical narrative that stretches from biblical Israel to the present, using the purported apostasy of the biblical tribe of Dan as an esoteric key to an unholy chronology that leads up to the current era as one that will usher in the Antichrist. Beginning with the apostasy of the Tribe of Dan, going through their absorption of Egyptian esotericism, to their later manifestations in Roman Catholicism, the Merovingians, the Knights Templar, and the Illuminati, Aho’s website presents a linear vision of history as a demonic corruption of God’s plan. Colera’s analysis of this particular Christian narrative often treats “Christianity” as a discernable whole, which he backs up with selective quoting of scripture. His purpose here is to draw the website’s argumentation into closer proximity to Christianity as a whole than most Christian practitioners would care to admit, but this strategy ignores the extent to which contemporary scholarship has dissolved “Christianity” into “Christianities.” At various points, Colera reflects the upside-down logic of the narrative back onto contemporary academic protocols, for example, by treating structuralism and Braudel’s idea of “long history,” as similar exercises in attempting to create meaning beyond the empirically immediate. However, he also maintains an implicit commitment to a secular perspective as, for example, his comparison of the patent ignorance of the website’s author(s) with that of the founders of Islam, Mormonism, and New Age spirituality.This book will be useful to scholars of esoteric religions, Evangelical Christianity, and the place of the Internet in contemporary society. Given that members of the Republican Party focused on questions concerning pedophilia during Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination hearings—which the journalist Amanda Marcotte has taken as sign that the anonymous website QAnon is driving the political agenda of one of the two major American political parties—it remains timely in a political sense. Colera sees his contribution as primarily a disinterested study, although he acknowledges its political implications.My primary criticism of the book is that Colera’s purported objectivity leads him to insist that we must give the authors of the website credit for restricting their antisemitic logic to merely a portion of the Jewish people. He might well have investigated how such a “narrow” antisemitism depends on and legitimates the general antisemitic logic that has fueled violence for centuries. This serious objection aside, the book remains a useful entry into a mode of thinking that is far more pertinent than academic pursuers of reasoned discourse might wish to admit.

How Much Should You Care About Algorithmic Transparency as Manipulation?

Wang (Philosophy & Technology 35, 2022) introduces a Foucauldian power account of algorithmic transparency. This short commentary explores when this power account is appropriate. It is first observed that the power account is a constructionist one, and that such accounts often come with both factual and evaluative claims. In an instance of Hume’s law, the evaluative claims do not follow from the factual claims, leaving open the question of how much constructionist commitment (Hacking, 1999) one should have. The concept of acts in equilibrium (Nozick, 1981) is then used to explain how different individuals reading Wang can end up with different evaluative attitudes towards algorithmic transparency, despite factual agreement. The commentary concludes by situating constructionist commitment inside a larger question of how much to think of our actions, identifying conflicting arguments.

Counter Memes and Anti-Legends in Online Welfare Discourse

Abstract Using welfare memes as a case study, this research explores the characteristics and efficacy of counter memes, including anti-legend counter memes, as strategies for the critique of hegemonic discourse and pervasive stereotypes in the increasingly powerful realm of the internet and social media. Key findings suggest that while many memes that appear to counter dominant legends may do more harm than good, anti-legends as well as memes that target stigma are particularly effective due to competing strategies using parody, irony, and factual claims.

Ukraine, Open-Source Investigations, and the Future of International Legal Discourse

AbstractRussia's aggression against Ukraine has brought into focus the growing significance of open-source information for international legal processes. Enabled by novel digital technologies, civil society actors have seized the opportunity provided by the vast amount of publicly available evidence to counter-narrate Russia's pretexts to justify its invasion within the deliberative bodies of the United Nations. This Essay explains the potential of this emerging practice to influence international legal discourse by increasing the costs for actors who base their conduct on false factual claims.

Psychology, Physiology, Medicine: The Perspectivist Interpretation of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality

Abstract This article introduces the perspectivist interpretation of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (GM), characterized by two core theses. According to the results thesis, the three treatises of GM introduce three types of critical results, respectively: psychological claims about the value of morality for the interests of various character types; physiological claims about its value for the ‘progress of the species’; and medical claims about its value for health. According to the distinction thesis, the critical results of GM are descriptive, while their reader-specific implications (and therapeutic effects) are normative. This interpretation illuminates the genealogical method of GM by answering four fundamental questions about (Q1) its historical method, (Q2) the history of morality that it reveals, (Q3) the critical results of GM, and (Q4) their intended therapeutic effects. Challenging the widespread assumption that the critical results of GM are evaluative claims, the perspectivist interpretation reveals the novelty of Nietzsche’s “new demand” for a critique of values not only relative to his predecessors’ approach to critique, but also to his own previous works. GM offers a critique that is grounded on factual claims, at once extramoral and external to (Christian) morality, and internal to its readers’ evaluative perspectives, even those who remain beholden to (Christian) moral values. Consequently, its authority and therapeutic efficacy are not threatened by discrepancies between it and its readers’ affective-evaluative preferences.

How fact-checkers delimit their scope of practices and use sources: Comparing professional and partisan practitioners

Fact-checkers, as their names suggest, are supposedly agents who check the validity of “facts.” But in reality, how do fact-checkers delimit the scope of their practices? What sources do they use to establish the truth and falsity of the examined materials? Do the practices of different types of fact-checkers vary in these aspects? This study examines how professional and partisan fact-checkers deal with facticity during a protest movement in Hong Kong. The content analysis shows that partisan fact-checkers, when compared to professional fact-checkers, are less likely to restrict themselves to debunking factual claims, and they are more likely to provide no source information for the materials used. Posts addressing “misleading claims,” as opposed to factual claims, are where partisan inclinations are more clearly exhibited. Moreover, partisan fact-checkers used government information in ways consistent with their political predilection. Implications of the findings on our understanding of the fact-checking enterprise are discussed.

Values at stake at the end of life: Analyses of personal preferences among Swedish physicians

Background Physician-assisted suicide is a controversial issue and has sometimes raised emotion-laden reactions. Against this backdrop, we have analyzed how Swedish physicians are reasoning about physician-assisted suicide if it were to be legalized. Methods and participants We conducted a cross-sectional study and analyzed 819 randomly selected physicians’ responses from general practitioners, geriatricians, internists, oncologists, psychiatrists, surgeons, and all palliativists. Apart from the main questions about their attitude toward physician-assisted suicide, we also asked what would happen with the respondents’ own trust in healthcare if physician-assisted suicide were legalized. Response options were that trust would decrease, not be influenced, or would increase. Results We identified a strong statistical association between on the one hand those whose own trust would increase and who were pro physician-assisted suicide, and on the other hand those who were against physician-assisted suicide and whose own trust would decrease [relative risk: 16.7 (95% confidence interval: 10.2–27.2)]. Among those whose own trust would not be influenced (n = 456), 60% were pro pysician-assisted suicide, 16% were against, and 24% were undecided. Of those whose trust would increase or not be influenced, a large majority supported autonomy-based arguments, whereas those whose trust would decrease supported non-maleficence-based arguments. Conclusion Analyzing the answers after having divided respondents into those whose own trust in healthcare would decrease or increase and not be influenced brings about interesting results such as how the three groups prioritize arguments for and against physician-assisted suicide. This way of analyzing the data seems to be a promising strategy when identifying value-impregnated factual claims.

Rhetoric of derisive laughter in political debates on the EU.

This paper focuses on the argumentative role of derisive laughter in broadcast political debates. Using Discursive Psychology (DP) we analyse how politicians use derisive laughter as an argumentative resource in multi-party interactions, in the form of debates about the UK and the European Union. Specifically, we explore how both pro- and anti-EU politicians use derisive laughter to manage issues of who-knows-what and who-knows-better. We demonstrate the uses of derisive laughter by focusing on two discrete, yet pervasive, interactional phenomena in our data – extended laughter sequences and snorts. We argue that in the context of political debates derisive laughter does more than signal trouble and communicate contempt; it is, more than often, mobilized in the service of ideological argumentation and used as a form of challenge to factual claims.