Protecting the truth: Lecturer provides tools to identify misinformation

Harshini Kanala, Contributing Writer

Mike Caulfield, a research scientist who specializes in the spread of online rumors and misinformation during elections and crisis events, delivered VCU Libraries’ third annual Social Justice Lecture at James Branch Cabell Library on Oct. 15.

His lecture, “Rumors of Theft: Navigating Election Integrity Discourse Online,” focused on misinformation and election integrity, according to VCU Libraries.

Caulfield began by introducing his Stop, Investigate, Find and Trace method, developed in 2016, to decide what sources are reputable. He said this approach increased a student’s ability to make sound judgments six-fold.

“This method was tested in about 17 peer-reviewed studies, all of them finding significant improvements in student capability,” Caulfield said.

Caulfield showed the audience three examples of misinformation in elections. His first example was the confusion surrounding the “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County, Florida during the 2000 presidential election.

Over 2,000 Democratic voters voted for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Democratic candidate Al Gore, according to Stanford University.

“Pat was known for believing that the U.S. shouldn’t have joined the war against Hitler in World War II and for saying the gas chambers of Treblinka, a death camp, may have been fiction — weird for a candidate to be getting a lot of the third-party vote of large liberal Jewish districts,” Caulfield said.

Caulfield introduced a five-step process to analyze events like the butterfly ballot, which includes asking if it was intentional, disproportionate and if it happened at all. He said his method is often used by experts but is an intuitive process picked up by journalists and even the general public.

“What we find is, when reporters have looked at this or when individuals talk about this, they have an intuitive sense of these questions,” Caulfield said.

For Palm Beach County, the butterfly ballot confusion was, despite rumors, found to be an accident mostly affecting older people with poor eyesight, according to Caulfield.

“It was difficult for older voters because it was too big of a change from the older design,” Caulfield said. “A local paper recount that didn’t get done until January 2021 showed 6,500 votes were lost for Gore.”

The 2002 Help America Vote Act replaced punch-card voting and created a federal agency for standardizing elections, which made elections more secure and accurate, according to Caulfield. He said good discourse and evidence combined can lead to positive changes.

“If we bring evidence to the table and evaluate each other’s evidence, we can get to things that actually improve elections in this country,” Caulfield said.

Caulfield’s second example was an untrue post on X, known as Twitter at the time, saying Mormon voters were instructed to bring their mail-in ballots to church and vote as a group.

“It spread before it could be checked,” Caulfield said. “Took days to check and took a minute to post. Before it was debunked three days later, everyone already moved on to the next story — that is how the internet has changed things for us.”

His last example involved Arizona voters who got mail-in ballots with no local races due to a registration error. Arizona law requires registered voters to provide proof of citizenship to vote in local races, according to Caulfield.

Caulfield said this was not intentional and the number ended up being too small to sway an election.

“Errors that are paraded as evidence of fraud are very often fixable,” Caulfield said.

Caulfield said students can evaluate their own knowledge base by asking questions like “is this what people think it is, or is this what I think it is?”

“What we found in most civic misinformation is not specifically the truth or falsity of a statement — it’s usually a person using a piece of information in a deceptive way to match their beliefs,” Caulfield said.

Caulfield summarized the lecture into outcomes of good and bad evidence and reviewed his tips on how to navigate bad evidence.

“Good arguments with good evidence produce useful outcomes. Bad arguments with misrepresented evidence produce bad outcomes,” Caulfield said. “The current environment promotes a flood of misrepresented evidence. Slow down, seek context, reassess, contextualize progress.”

The lecture ended with a 40-minute Q&A during which Caulfield addressed topics like journalism failures, bias in seeking resources, human evolution causing humans to be group thinkers, how to question reason without attacking belief, using credible sources that seem to provide data with incentive and how to handle feelings in arguments.

In an interview with The Commonwealth Times, Caulfield said most misinformation isn’t people lying purposely — people are more attracted to misinformation that confirms their beliefs because it’s human nature.

“There’s a strong concept in psychology that belief change is hard,” Caulfield said. “For example, in elections, when you are running in an election or you’re playing on a sports team, you have to believe you will win.”

This belief allows people to handle losses and keep moving forward, according to Caulfield.

“Committed partisans always believe they are going to win,” Caulfield said. “Traditionally, weirdly, election misinformation helped people come down from their beliefs slowly after losses, but in this current environment people always want to believe.”

Suzanne Hall, a retired chief communications officer at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, told The Commonwealth Times in an email interview that she found the material to be rigorous and interesting.

“I enjoyed the speaker very much and felt like I was — again — in a class understanding the discernment practice of weighing the validity of statements and processes,” Hall stated.

Carol Stanfield, a previous mass communications student from the class of 1992 and the president of Friends of VCU Libraries, said the lecture was engaging and helpful.

“I thought it was clever that he took us back before the Trump era of presidential politics to illustrate his main point,” Stanfield said. “We can get so tangled up in the latest outrageous thing, and it was good to have that context.”

Stanfield said her biggest takeaway from the lecture was the kind way he suggested you approach someone who has been taken in by misinformation.

“I liked when he said, ‘It’s not that your belief is wrong, it’s that you can’t get there with this evidence,’ that, plus the admonition to slow down when you come across ‘a really juicy piece of evidence that proves you’re right,’ because that’s when you’re at your most careless,” Stanfield said.

She intends to use this information moving forward to get her points through to tough people, Stanfield said.

“In the past, I have resisted debunking claims repeated or posted by acquaintances, and I may use this approach to see if I can be helpful rather than continuing to ignore and change the subject,” Stanfield said.