I’ve been a fact-checker at MediaWise for nearly three years. I started when I was 13 years old and I’m now 16.
When my first fact check was produced everyone was still wearing masks amid the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines had not yet been made widely available, and Americans were still wrapped up in the politics of the 2020 election.
So much has changed since then — but a whole lot remains the same.
It was in late 2020 that I came across a post online advertising that MediaWise — an organization I had not heard of — was seeking teen applicants interested in being “fact-checkers.” The obvious question I asked myself at the time was: How can teenagers be fact-checkers?
I soon found out. The idea behind MediaWise and the Teen Fact-Checking Network is that young people fact-check misinformation and disinformation in a way that helps the viewer, ideally also a teenager, gain the skills to fact-check content they see online on their own. I decided to apply. I sent in a writing sample and a video of myself reading a script. In no way did I expect that I would actually get the position. A few weeks later, however, I got an email informing me that I would soon, in fact, be working for MediaWise.
In the following weeks I would pitch my first fact check. Keep in mind that this was all happening in December 2020, when then-President Donald Trump was contesting the results of the presidential election. So, when I was looking to pitch my first fact check I thought it would be a good idea to do something about election disinformation.
I found a YouTube video that included an individual sharing completely untrue data and statistics about the election. We ended up not going with that topic, which I guess was my first lesson that not everything I pitched would become a fact check.
Instead, my first fact check at MediaWise was about dancing robots.
A company called Boston Dynamics released a video of robots dancing to the song “Do You Love Me” by The Contours. A lot of social media users claimed the video was generated by CGI. We explained, however, that Boston Dynamics develops robots designed for government, military and other uses. In other words, the robots in the video would easily be able to dance to a song given the wide array of other tasks they can accomplish. Bottom line, they were legit! In writing this, I went back and watched that fact check, and it feels like a lifetime ago.
Another fact check that stands out to me is one that I wrote and filmed after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. This fact check serves as a prime example of what MediaWise aims to do. In this video, we provided context, explaining why Russia invaded Ukraine and giving some history between the two countries. We then dove into specific claims that were circulating online and fact-checked them individually.
During the time that I’ve been with MediaWise, the world has been full of newsworthy, controversial and disinformation-prone events. I’ve written fact checks about the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2020 election, the Biden administration and guns. I even wrote a fact check about the moon landing. There really are few topics that misinformation hasn’t touched.
I’ve found that two things really set MediaWise apart from other fact-checking organizations. One, teenagers are the ones doing the fact-checking. And two, while fact-checking is important, it isn’t the sole purpose of our videos. Our goal is for the viewer to come away from the video having a better idea of how to fact-check themselves.
We explain skills such as lateral reading, reading upstream, doing a keyword search, reverse image searching and a whole lot more. If MediaWise were to only fact-check, we would fail to make even so much as a dent in the war on misinformation. But when we equip the viewers with the skills and knowledge to fact-check on their own, we are helping to make a greater impact.
It’s baffling to me that it has only been three years since I began at MediaWise. It feels that so much has changed in the world, but also that a lot has changed in my own life. When I began at MediaWise I was a middle schooler; I’m now a junior in high school and — as the two photos above show — I have grown up a bit in that time, too.
But, arguably, a lot has remained the same.
We’re on the brink of another presidential election, and it looks like both major political parties may be nominating the same two candidates they nominated in 2020. It also looks like fact-checkers will be presented with another flood of election disinformation that seeks to influence voters. Since the 2020 election, many social media platforms have scaled back content moderation, and experts believe that this — combined with the new threat from artificial intelligence — could culminate in an unprecedented level of disinformation.
Nevertheless, I remain cautiously uncynical. My generation’s unique ability to use technology and the internet means we are well equipped to combat disinformation — if we are aware of the necessary media literacy skills such as those that MediaWise teaches.
But there’s still more we have to do: We must make sure we are civically engaged through voting. We must be aware of global, national and local events. And we must maintain a commitment to the values of democracy both at home and abroad.
