Fact Checking
Ali Saffouri
63.4% of people do not fact-check. They believe in the credibility of the knowledge they attain from school or the media without question. I made up this statistic; however, you probably believed it without a question.
To further prove my statement, the statistic includes decimal places, so it must be true since its accurate, and thus the statement itself has to be true as well. In such situations we find two at fault: the speaker and the listener, as the speaker does not provide the necessary citation for their statistic, and the listener does not question the statistic itself.
In many situations, you can find a conflict of ideas, in which different people provide contradictory statements. For example, before a storm, we find ourselves being told that it will rain or snow and that there will not be a storm at all. The cynic in me does not believe any one of them, but the simplest way to know what is right (other than to research and find the answer on your own) is to just ask, “Where did you get your information from?” I found that this simple question can reveal the truth or the partial truth.
In the previous example, asking that question will help you learn the source of these people's "knowledge" of the storm. It could be the news, Facebook, or just intuition. At this point it is up to you to decide which source you find more reliable.
Therefore, the problem of the lack of fact-checking can easily be solved. If you want to give information you must provide your sources (evidence) and if you hear a piece of information, even if it seems authentic, always look into its source.