THE PRO-TRUTH PLEDGE
An Effective Strategy for Skeptics to Fight Fake News and Post-Truth Politics
How do we get politicians to stop lying? How do we get private citizens to stop sharing fake news on social media? Deception proved such a successful strategy for political causes and individual candidates in the UK and US elections in 2016 that the Oxford English Dictionary named post-truth as its word of the year, with the definition of “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The extensive sharing of fake news by private citizens led Collins Dictionary to choose “fake news” as its word of the year for 2017, meaning “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting.” (Skeptic, c0ntinues)
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Tired of living in a culture of lies, fake news, and alternative facts?
The Pro-Truth Pledge reverses the tide of lies by calling on politicians – and everyone else – to commit to truth-oriented behaviors. Join 3155 signers, 26 organizations, 66 government officials, and 310 public figures and take the pledge, demand that your elected representatives do so, and encourage your friends to take it!
I Pledge My Earnest Efforts To:
Share truth
- Verify: fact-check information to confirm it is true before accepting and sharing it
- Balance: share the whole truth, even if some aspects do not support my opinion
- Cite: share my sources so that others can verify my information
- Clarify: distinguish between my opinion and the facts
Honor truth
- Acknowledge: acknowledge when others share true information, even when we disagree otherwise
- Reevaluate: reevaluate if my information is challenged, retract it if I cannot verify it
- Defend: defend others when they come under attack for sharing true information, even when we disagree otherwise
- Align: align my opinions and my actions with true information
Encourage truth
- Fix: ask people to retract information that reliable sources have disproved even if they are my allies
- Educate: compassionately inform those around me to stop using unreliable sources even if these sources support my opinion
- Defer: recognize the opinions of experts as more likely to be accurate when the facts are disputed
- Celebrate: celebrate those who retract incorrect statements and update their beliefs toward the truth
The Pro-Truth Pledge has also been translated into Spanish; Hungarian; Russian; Ukrainian; Portugese; German
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