When I first started in journalism a decade ago, as a keen, green twenty-something with everything to learn, there was an art to fact-checking.
Good fact-checkers were sought after and celebrated, for catching everything from the misspelling of proper nouns to statistical inaccuracies from writers or sources. When I was a youngin at Chatelaine, you were often asked the question, “Are you fact-checking sure?” when you answered for a piece of information you included in a story. (And you’d better be fact-checking sure.)
My, how the mighty fact-checker has fallen in a world where we have to create technology to filter out the truth.
Earlier this week, Google and Facebook both announced plans to roll out tools in Canada to crack down on the “fake news” phenomenon; these features are already active in some parts of the US and the UK. The tools will help readers weed out false information so they’re only digesting credible facts, which essentially means you’ll be able to enable an article’s fact-checker (it’s actually referred to as the “fact-check function”) so you don’t spout off a completely untrue fact on social, at a party or, worse still, in a job interview. (Google is also banning fake-news publishers, and Facebook is rebooting the Trending feature when fake news becomes an issue.)
I don’t know whether I’m relieved, or horrified that this even needs to be a consideration.
It’s rare that I wish to go back in time 10+ years (during the days when I worked impossibly long hours to make an impression, when all of my extra money went to paying off my student debt, and before getting married and having two gorgeous, hilarious daughters) but I miss the fact-checking department, and knowing that media outlets were “fact-checking sure.” I never thought, a decade later, that the truth would take a backseat in such a widespread way.
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