Truth-hacking, fact-checking, and Lies with Friends

[F]act-checking websites have not extinguished misinformation and have become themselves political weapons. Even Kathleen Hall Jamieson, founder of FactCheck.org, has argued fact-checking may perpetuate lies by restating them…. On Tuesday morning, Jamieson helped frame the conversation: “What is truth? That is an irrelevant question!” she said. “We’re trying to ensure fidelity to the knowable. That is different from the larger world of normative inferences about what is true and what is false. What is desirable and what is good is not the purview of FactCheck.org.”

—Andrew Phelps of the Nieman Journalism Lab covering the Truthiness in Digital Media conference, a two-day affair cosponsored by the Berkman Center and MIT’s Center for Civic Media. Factcheck‘s Jamieson, quoted above, was one of a parade of thought-provoking and inspiring thinkers who presented over the course of the conference’s first day at Harvard Law School. The second day was a mini-hackathon at the Media Lab, deftly hosted by Ethan Zuckerman, where teams proposed a variety of data-driven tools for sorting fact from disinformation in networked media. Andrew, yours truly, and a cadre of Knight fellows from the BBC and National Geographic wireframed a social-mobile game, tentatively called Lies with Friends, to explore the serotonin-pumping joys of propagating falsehoods over networks. There wasn’t a game designer in the group (although Andrew, who developed Nieman’s fascinating future-of-journalism bot, Fuego, is a dab hand at data-driven journalism and coding). But we found the process of specifying a game was a great exercise for sorting out the social seductions of lying online.