NYT: Fact-Checkers Cannot Save Us [View all]

[Dennis Donovan]

NYT - (archived: https://archive.ph/dkWlc ) Fact-Checkers Cannot Save Us

In our interconnected modern world, education is critical in the fight against disinformation.



By Eliot Higgins
Eliot Higgins is an expert on how disinformation spreads via social media.

Dec. 6, 2024, 3:00 p.m. ET

Turning Point: The United States launched a broad effort, including sanctions and indictments, to fight Russian influence and disinformation campaigns related to the 2024 election.

Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, policymakers, think tanks, the media and intergovernmental organizations have responded to a surge in disinformation around the world.

Disinformation is often seen as a symptom of foreign interference; states or state-sponsored actors trying to influence the tides of geopolitics. Russia, for example, was blamed during the 2017 French presidential election for attempting to undermine Emmanuel Macron’s campaign, and it seems likely that Russian-linked accounts spread disinformation to sway public opinion in favor of leaving the European Union before the 2016 Brexit referendum.

But I have found that while disinformation is a common tool for countries like Russia and China, the growth in its power stems from a fundamental cultural and social shift — one that’s changed our relationship with information and the truth.

Over the past decade, my organization, Bellingcat, has investigated a wide range of issues, from chemical weapon attacks in Syria to the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine. Much of my work has involved debunking and fact-checking the competing narratives that tend to emerge around how such events unfold, using open-source data to identify people, weapons, vehicles and more. Some of the stories we check have little to no basis in factual evidence — they’re disinformation or conspiracy theories — yet they still gain traction across huge online communities.

The 2018 documentary “Behind the Curve” — which follows a handful of “flat earthers” as they try to prove their theory that the earth is a disk rather than a sphere — brought me to a key realization. Disparate groups such as flat earthers, anti-vaccination advocates and climate change deniers often share a distrust of mainstream science and a reliance on fringe theories. Vaccine opponents, for example, join flat earthers in rejecting well-established scientific consensus in favor of alternative explanations that align with their beliefs.



These groups can be broadly defined as people who have a deep distrust of authority and traditional sources of information such as governments, scientists, doctors or bankers. This distrust is frequently rooted in a sense of feeling betrayed or harmed by those authorities. There could be completely legitimate reasons — whether personal, social or political — for that sense of betrayal, but it often leads them online to seek alternative viewpoints outside the mainstream discourse. In doing so, they find communities that reflect and reinforce their feelings of skepticism and distrust.

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