Pro-Truth Pledge Urges Fact-Checking To Check Politicians’ Lies

COLUMBUS, OH — A storm surge of lies swamped the 2016 presidential election, leaving America with a hurricane-sized cleanup job in what is known “post-truth” era. But Gleb Tsipursky and other scientists hope to mop up the mess with a project called the Pro-Truth Pledge, which aims to return honesty to the 2018 midterm elections.

The idea is to get politicians, the media, private citizens and others to commit to verify facts before sharing information, share their sources, and clearly delineate the information they do share as a fact or opinion. It’s a big ask after the spectacle of an election that saw “fake news” stories shared almost as often as those from traditional news sources.

But Tsipursky, a history professor at Ohio State University’s Newark campus and a researcher with its Decision Science Collaborative, is encouraged by early results of the project, rolled out last March. At least 5,000 people worldwide, more than 2,100 of them in the United States, have taken the Pro-Truth Pledge so far, and some politicians are editing their social media feeds after being called out for not verifying posts.

No, President Donald Trump hasn’t taken the Pro-Truth Pledge, and Tsipursky doesn’t expect him to.

“He would be in immediate violation,” Tsipurksy told Patch. “He is continuing an atmosphere of lies and deception in the political sphere after the election. Many had hoped he would lay that aside, but the lies are continuing.”

“NOT A PARTISAN THING, A LYING THING”

Of course, Trump — who twists the truth about 5.5 times a day, according to an analysis by The Washington Post — isn’t the only politician accused of cherry-picking or bending facts to support specific objectives.

During the 2016 election cycle, Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee, got seven “Pants on Fire!” ratings from the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times and other media partners, though significantly fewer than Trump. He who was called out on the same scale more than 50 times from the time he announced his candidacy in June 2015 until the election. A similar organization, FactCheck.org, a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center, found that both candidates spun facts with an eye toward political gain.

“It’s not a partisan thing,” Tsipursky said. “It’s a lying thing.”

The Pro-Truth Pledge isn’t as much about calling out liars, who aren’t likely to take the pledge in the first place, as it is about holding accountable those politicians and others who do promise to tell the truth, Tsipursky said.

If enough people take it, Tsipursky thinks it will help Americans navigate the confusing era of post-truth, so defined by Oxford Dictionaries, which made post-truth its 2016 word of the year, as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

To some extent, bending the truth is just the nature of many politicians, especially during campaigns when they’re concerned less with constituent service and more with simply winning elections and keeping their jobs, Tsipursky said.

“Unscrupulous politicians have a big leg up because with social media, they can reach people directly and easily manipulate them,” Tsipursky said. “People are very bad at distinguishing between truth and falsehood.”

Add to the mix the social media ads placed by a Russian troll farm to exploit divisions in American society. Those ads were “highly problematic” in the 2016 election, Tsipursky said, noting “fake news” stories were believed almost as often as stories from credible sources, and were more widely shared.

REPUTATIONAL FLOGGING

The resulting age of post-truth in politics was a toxic stew that left many voters unsure if there’s an antidote. Tsipursky said he and other collaborators in the Pro-Truth Pledge project heard over and over from voters that “they have no hope left, and they don’t know how to address the current atmosphere.”

The Pro-Truth Pledge, he said, “gives them something meaningful they can do to change the situation in a substantive way.”

“We can’t put the genie back in the bottle,” Tsipursky said.

“You can’t get that back,” Tsipursky said. “It’s about dealing with a new environment.”

The idea behind the pledge is that people who take it will be more thoughtful about what they share, as Idaho congressional candidate Michael Smith was after sharing a screenshot of a tweet purportedly by Trump that was critical of minority and disabled children. He couldn’t find the original tweet and couldn’t verify if it had been deleted or was fake to begin with.

“Due to the Truth Pledge I have taken, I have to say I have not been able to verify this post,” he wrote on Facebook.

Pledge-taker Johnny Martin, a candidate running for the statehouse in Arizona, admitted in a tweet that he “may have gotten some of [his] facts wrong” at a protest rally against a United Nations resolution banning the death penalty for LGBT people.

“It is important to me to publicly correct this misstatement and to clarify some details about the resolution because truth matters, and because I have signed onto the Pro-Truth Pledge,” he tweeted.

Politicians who intend to lie are better off not taking the pledge, Tsipursky said, because volunteers will crowdsource what they say. Politicians who do lie, or simply make an error in judgment by sharing a story or social media post they believe is accurate, are given an opportunity to correct their statements.

But if they don’t take back the lie, a mediation committee gets involved and they face what amounts to a public reputational flogging. The mediation committee will flood the email inboxes of media venues with advisories that the individual is in contempt of the Pro-Truth pledge, as well as alert constituents and ask them to lobby that person through social media posts, text messages, phone calls, letters and in-person meetings to hold them accountable. They’ll also be called out on the Pro-Truth Pledge website.

CHANGING BEHAVIOR

Pledge signers are asked to commit to 12 behaviors, including sharing information that may not support their beliefs, that research in psychology shows increases truthfulness.

The success of the project to change the confusing landscape of what the truth is requires the participation not just of politicians, but just as importantly of private citizens. They’re encouraged to pressure politicians to take the pledge, as well as commit to be more skeptical about sharing posts that support their political view.

“If we don’t make a difference, who would?” Tsipursky said. “If we know our society is broken and we just go on as if nothing has happened, we are part of the problem, not the solution.”

One of those signing on was a retired U.S. intelligence officer, who wrote in a blog post that he decided not to share an article he admitted “played right to [his] political biases.” He wrote that his “first inclination was to share it as quickly and widely as possible.”

“But then I remembered the pledge I’d signed and put the brakes on,” he wrote, adding that it was “a complete dud, ‘fake news’ as they say” and that he will be more vigilant about fact-checking stories that appeal to his political leanings.

That individual's behavioral change gets right to the heart of the project.

Social media algorithms are tailored to appeal to users’ gut reactions. “I ‘like’ this doesn’t mean this is true,” Tsipursky said. “Liking is about what we prefer. We feel affinity to our tribe. The Pro-Truth Pledge is specifically meant to address these affinities.”

Tsipursky and his truth-seeking tribe hope to have 50,000 people signed up by the time the midterm elections roll around on Tuesday, Nov. 6.

The rewards for signing on are significant — among them, oodles of praise on social media for taking the pledge and the right to put the Pro-Truth Pledge badge on their websites. In the same way mistruths spread virally in 2016, so will their pledges to turn back the tide of lies, Tsipursky and his co-collaborators believe.

But will it actually work?Will America become less politically polarized and interested in the truth?

Tsipursky points to the environmental movement, which began in 1962 with Rachel Carson’s book, “A Silent Spring,” that documented the effects of indiscriminate use of pesticides on the environment.

“Eight years later, Richard Nixon founded the EPA,” Tsipursky said. “It all happened because of a grassroots movement. The Information Age allows us to cut down the time of movement growth.

“If people can recycle, they can check facts,” he said.

(AP Photo/Seth Perlman-File)