A Group Exercise On Collective Fact Checking
Launch library · evergreen read
Working through a claim together as a whole group, rather than tackling it entirely individually, surfaces a considerably wider range of checking approaches than any single person typically applies when working alone, since different people naturally gravitate toward genuinely different techniques and sources based entirely on their own personal habits and preferences.
Assign no fixed roles at the very outset and simply observe carefully which checks each individual person reaches for instinctively without being told. Comparing these different instincts together carefully afterward often reveals genuinely useful techniques that had not occurred to any of the other members of the group beforehand.
Repeating this exercise periodically with a slowly rotating group of participants builds a genuinely shared collective toolkit over time, spreading effective techniques widely across the whole group rather than leaving them isolated within whichever individual person within the group originally happened to think of them first on their own.