Misinformation spreads fast in communities – both online and offline. The Roy Howard Community Journalism Center is trying to slow its spread in southeast Mississippi communities with What Is True?, an initiative that creators can replicate to build trust and engagement with their audiences.
The initiative entails two parts: a hotline, where anyone in the community can reach out by phone, email or the center’s website to submit questions or claims they’ve seen that seem suspicious or unclear; and media literacy workshops for the public given at schools, libraries, civic groups and faith communities that teach things like how to recognize false or misleading content, tools to verify information and how bias, emotion and algorithms shape what you see.
“We wanted to be able to help the local communities be able to use the information that they were getting better,” said Ame Posey, community engagement specialist with the center who leads What Is True? “Just the amount of information that we’re getting now is so divisive and so much so that it’s ripping even families apart.”
Posey works with a team of four graduate researchers who investigate the hotline questions through a combination of online research and questions to government or community officials to find out what the truth is. They then not only send those answers back to the original person who asked the question, but publish the findings as a story on rhcjcnews.com and with media partners and put together short-form videos for social media and local broadcasts and shareable graphics and explainers.
“We’ve actually had a lot of really good response from the community,” Posey said. “The hotline is still fairly new, so we’re still building up for regular usage, but we’re getting at least a good few questions each month. When we take the sources out into the community itself, we get a lot of really great response from people who didn’t know it was a resource available to them.”
Posey said they are also working on expanding the hotline to a text message service.
For anyone who wants to get started incorporating a fact-checking service into their platform, Posey advises to choose a question or topic to fact-check while waiting for people to submit questions that they know will appeal to their audience.
She also advised being very transparent with how you go about fact-checking and cite your sources heavily to build trust with your audience. Sharing the behind the scenes of the process of fact-checking can also help.
Posey also recommends choosing questions and claims that have an effect on a large number of people or are causing widespread confusion, especially if you don’t have the capacity to do fact-checks frequently. Oftentimes people will submit questions that are their personal curiosities, and those aren’t always the best use of time when trying to fight misinformation.
It’s crucial to success to tailor the information to your audience. This means the topics or examples that you’re choosing, but also the level at which you’re explaining misinformation.
“We have some audiences that we do the training with that are more familiar with media literacy,” Posey said. “So of course, we don’t have to do basic definitions with them. They’re maybe a little more open to certain examples like political examples because they’re already coming in with this base knowledge.”
But other groups who have been less exposed to the concept of misinformation and media literacy may be more sensitive to topics like politics that can be divisive.
“So for somebody else, if they’re doing it on their own platform, I would say really take a good look at who your audience is,” Posey said. “Where do you think their starting point is for this topic and what do you think their tolerance is for certain issues? And be very careful because it’s one of those things we teach about watching for clickbait, watching for rage baiting. So be careful not to do those things while also trying to teach about those things.”