Fact-checking Technology Inches Forward

“But it cannot be the duty, because it is not the right, of the state to protect the public against false doctrine. The very purpose of the First Amendment is to foreclose public authority from assuming a guardianship of the public mind through regulating the press, speech, and religion. In this field, every person must be his own watchman for truth, because the forefathers did not trust any government to separate the true from the false for us.” U.S. Supreme Court in Thomas v. Collins, 323 U.S. 516, 545 (1945)

Researchers at Duke University are developing technology for near real-time TV political fact checking. Phys⚛️org writes:

A Duke University team expects to have a product available for election year that will allow television networks to offer real-time fact checks onscreen when a politician makes a questionable claim during a speech or debate.

The mystery is whether any network will choose to use it.

The response to President Donald Trump's Jan. 8 speech on border security illustrated how fact-checking is likely to be an issue over the next two years. Networks briefly considered not airing Trump live and several analysts contested some of his statements afterward, but nobody questioned him while he was speaking.

Duke already offers an app, developed by professor and Politifact founder Bill Adair, that directs users to online fact checks during political events. A similar product has been tested for television, but is still not complete.

The TV product would call on a database of research from Politifact, Factcheck.org and The Washington Post to point out false or misleading statements onscreen. For instance, Trump's statement that 90 percent of the heroin that kills 300 Americans each week comes through the southern border would likely trigger an onscreen explanation that much of the drugs were smuggled through legal points of entry and wouldn't be affected by a wall.

The Duke Tech & Check Cooperative conducted a focus group test in October, showing viewers portions of State of the Union speeches by Trump and predecessor Barack Obama with fact checks inserted. It was a big hit, Adair said.

"People really want onscreen fact checks," he said. "There is a strong market for this and I think the TV networks will realize there's a brand advantage to it."

If that's the case, the networks aren't letting on. None of the broadcast or cable news divisions would discuss Duke's product when contacted by The Associated Press, or their own philosophies on fact checking.

Network executives are likely to tread very carefully, both because of technical concerns about how it would work, the risk of getting something wrong or the suspicion that some viewers might consider the messages a political attack.

"It's an incredibly difficult challenge," said Mark Lukasiewicz, longtime NBC News executive who recently became dean of Hofstra University's communications school.

This shows the complexity of trying to implement defenses against dark free speech (lies, deceit, deepfakes, unwarranted opacity, unwarranted emotional manipulation, etc.) in America. With a few exceptions such as defamation, false advertising and child porn, American law recognizes lies and deceit as deserving of as much protection as honest speech.

America needs to somehow harden its defenses against dark free speech without enabling authoritarians and liars to use it as a weapon against opposition or the public interest. It is going to be an extremely difficult fight, assuming it is possible to make significant headway. Maybe it is time for professional broadcast news outlets to not do real-time broadcasting of politicians' speeches and rhetoric. After the fact fact-checking is far less effective than real-time fact-checking. And, maybe it is time to begin a long fight to re-establish the old, now illegal, fairness doctrine as a partial antidote to dark free speech.

B&B orig: 1/20/19