Fact-Checking Information: the Urgent Need for a Informed Voter Population

It's high time we vote for the right person that can get it back, and we have to do it right.

The US presidential election is just around the corner, but the political landscape is looking bleak and chaotic. As disinformation becomes increasingly pervasive, being able to distinguish between what is real and what is not is more important than ever. Fact-checks are always a crucial part of the election process: as voters, the audience has to know if they are being told the truth.

Information does matter. Trump’s AI video of Taylor Swift endorsing him prompted urged the singer to speak up on her actual stance on the presidential elections. Following her Instagram post stating that presidential candidate Kamala Harris “fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them,” there was a 400% spike in vote registrationsregistrators. Truth matters.

While voters should be competent enough to distinguish truth from slanders, unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Social media—yes, it’s social media, again–is extremely influential, and many mudslinging memes from both sides are based on false or misleading information, cherry-picked to fit a belief or ideology. Ironically, social media is often where people get their information from–in fact, 20% of adults in America get their news from Instagram. Sorry to break it to you, but that 20-second reel you watched remixing Trump’s statement about immigrants eating cats and dogs should not be your primary source. There are other, more reliable sources available to voters. The Washington Post and The New York Times are both places where voters can get accurate statistical information.

Nevertheless, it’s crucial to realize that sources such as CNN, The Washington Post, or The New York Times, have their own fair share of bias. Indeed, there is no objective truth. One can talk about the same event in a thousand different ways by spinning the context. It is ultimately the job of us, as the readers, the voters, and the people, to decide which of the interpretations we want to incorporate into our decisions.

A voter cannot be spoon-fed the latest edition of true-or-false by news outlets as if they were a toddler. While it is an expectation that we do not receive any fake news hastily written for clout from any of our news outlets, it is up to the readers who read them to conclude which information they want to absorb, and what information they will discard.

Lindsay Baik