Outrageous News: Poll Results

Last month, we asked you what you did in a recent situation in which you read something that outraged you. Here’s what you told us.

• Four of you fact checked the information and discovered it was false so kept it to yourself.
• Five of you fact checked the information and found it to be false and told others that this was false information.
• Three of you were outraged by information that you fact checked and discovered was true (yes, sometimes the outrage is warranted).
• Three of you quietly seethed.
• Two of you shared the information. Because of the imperfection of surveys, we don’t know whether the information was true or not.

Some of you selected answers not on our survey including the following.

• Not sharing the information, even though you fact checked it and found that it was true.
• One of you shared information based on your assessment of the reliability of the source of the information.
• One of you wrote letters to the newspaper publishing the misinformation.
• One person reported the misinformation to a supervisor at work.

We also asked you about your favourite fact checking sites. Most of you rely on a search engine and/or the Internet in general. A few of you mentioned Wikipedia. Snopes and PolitiFact both received a couple of mentions. Some use a two-part process, such as “internet plus brain” or “Google and then follow up on sources.” 

Regardless of which tools you use, we hope that you will look for evidence that both supports and refutes the claim, and remain cautious about sharing information without first ensuring that it is true.