Fact-Checking Has a Fraud Problem
Fact-Checking Has a Fraud Problem
X's "Community Notes" is broken when it comes to the gun violence issue
By: Devin Hughes
On November 2nd, a social media post by Ally Sammarco, a DC-based political consultant with a large social media following, went viral.
She argued in her post that an assault weapons ban is necessary, and that trying to protect oneself with a handgun against such a weapon would likely be futile. She also wrote a follow-up post stating:
“For those who need to hear this: You aren’t special. You aren’t going to be the hero who saves everyone. You literally would not be able to defend yourself.”
A related video and follow-up went viral, garnering millions of views and thousands of comments. While this wasn’t surprising given that banning assault weapons is a hot-button topic with passionate disagreement, what happened next was shocking.
A Community Note — X’s (formerly Twitter) form of crowd-sourced fact-checking — swiftly appeared, stating:
“In a 2022 study of mass shooting incidents, the Crime Prevention Research Institute found that civilians stopped at least 34.4% of active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2021. Excluding gun free zones, where civilians would not be lawfully armed, that number increased to 51%.”
This note is false and relies on fraudulent data.
For starters, the organization it references is called the Crime Prevention Research Center, not Institute. Also, the study it cites is about active shooting incidents, not mass shootings. And as GVPedia has detailed in the past, the data cited is fraudulent.
The truth is that the FBI’s active shooter research found that armed civilians halted 4.4% of active shooter cases since 2000.
The self-published study the Community Note cites was written by pro-gun advocate, John Lott, and the findings result from covertly expanding the FBI’s definition of an “active shooter event,” despite Lott’s false public protestations that he was following the FBI’s definition.
The FBI uses the term “active shooting” to refer to attempted mass shootings, regardless of how many people are killed or injured. Lott’s study, though, defines an “active shooting” as any shooting that occurs in public and is not part of another ongoing crime.
Lott’s study then only applies that new definition to cases in which there was a defensive gun use, while excluding thousands of cases in which a defensive gun use did not occur.
This deceptive tactic allows Lott to claim that the percentage of active shooter cases stopped by a defensive gun use is vastly higher than it is in reality.
The end result is blatant statistical malpractice.
While the Community Note was eventually taken down after a day of pressure, the damage was done. More than one million people saw the note, and many likely accepted it as a legitimate factcheck. Meanwhile, the number of people who realized the note was taken down numbers at most in the hundreds.
Thanks to the misbegotten “fact check,” disinformation outspread factual data by a wide margin.
While probably the most egregious Community Notes case, it is not the first time this has occurred. Community Notes is broken when it comes to touching the gun violence issue, given its contentious nature.
Even more troubling, it isn’t just crowd-sourced fact-checking with a fraud problem. Professional fact-checkers have fallen prey in the past as well.
When dealing with disinformation, we cannot rely on fact-checkers — either crowd-sourced or professional. Further, a reactive response to these failed fact-checks is already too late. A proactive response is mandatory, and Countering the Firehose of Falsehood provides the solution: Inoculation.
Inoculation Theory treats misinformation as a virus, which can be protected against by “vaccinating” members of the public by exposing them to a weakened form of the misinformation in a controlled setting with a warning that the information is false and then providing a detailed refutation.
Actively countering disinformation before it spreads is crucial. The only way to stop new myths from taking hold is to notice them early and muster a swift and overwhelming response. Once a myth becomes entrenched, it becomes far harder to root out.
It is long past time for organizations in the gun violence prevention movement to allocate the necessary resources to proactively counter disinformation.
Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research and data.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.