A jury of teenagers puts misinformation on trial

Architect and writer Paul Shepheard has a knack for inventing pointed allegories. Nearly 30 years ago he penned one that still rings true — more than ever, in fact, since the political turbulence of 2016:

It seems to me sometimes that we’re all sitting in a huge valley with people shouting contradictory things at each other… Free to speak, free to disagree. It’s contemporary life, and it sounds like cacophony, because everyone shouts at the same time.

We’ve all heard the cacophony — and the pundits. We’re living at an epistemologically troubled moment in history. Entire populations have been unmoored from the kind of consensus reality that held sway in less slippery times. In this post and the next, I want to recommend some podcasts that are reckoning more or less philosophically with this post-truth moment and what it means for education.

The Last Archive brings a historian’s perspective to our changing relationship with truth. With an archivist’s skill for research, a storyteller’s gift for weaving narratives, a detective’s nose for clues and a 1930s radio drama aesthetic, podcast creator Jill Lepore looks to the past century for answers to the tongue-in-cheek question: ‘Who killed truth?’

The podcast¹ unearths an assortment of frauds, hoaxes, manipulations and outright lies spun over the decades. Some of the most interesting episodes examine the nature of evidence and testimony or the escalation of uncertainty. The Last Archive also takes a look at the role of scepticism, distinguishing the critical thinker’s exercise of reasonable doubt from the conspiracy theorist’s abandonment of trust in any kind of inquiry process.

The episode ‘Epiphany’ focuses on the climate of distrust prevailing in America today: a distrust that has fuelled reciprocal accusations of lying by partisan voices on either side of the nation’s political divide. Lepore points out that following the January 6 2020 insurrection and the impeachment of Donald Trump, Republicans insisted that the election had been stolen — a claim Democrats referred to as the big lie — while Republicans for their part held that the big lie was instead the legitimation of Joe Biden’s presidency. ”The very expression ‘the big lie’ became meaningless, the way that earlier ‘fake news’ became meaningless: just another way to disagree with someone”, Lepore says. In other words: pounding the table will get you nowhere.

The episodes ‘Trial By Teenager’ (Parts 1 and 2) have special relevance for us as philosophical educators. In these episodes, internet law scholar Jonathan Zittrain shares a novel idea for tackling the problem of political misinformation. His idea: juries of high school students should act as content moderators of political ads on social media. In ‘Trial By Teenager’, The Last Archive presents a small-scale test of this idea. A few classes of senior high school students are tasked with fact-checking a range of political ads and deciding which ads are fit to be posted on social media. As the experiment unfolds, students view the ads, assess whether they pass a threshold of accuracy and honesty, deliberate in small groups and seek a consensus on whether the ad meets a minimum standard of truthfulness. 

Zittrain is quite serious about the prospects of this idea both as a solution to the content moderation challenges faced by social media platforms, and as an educational innovation. Students get the opportunity to exercise important civic muscles: crafting their reasoning, expressing dissent usefully, arbitrating in disputes, and having their decisions respected.

In class, teacher Benji Cohen begins with the questions “What is a fact, and how do you know when something is true?” Small group huddles are followed by rich, whole-class dialogue, of which I’ll quote just a fraction:

Ruth: ‘Fact’ is like something that can be proven, like with an experiment or science or something. I feel like people get facts and opinions mixed up a lot. And beliefs…

Anya: So a fact is something that can be like proven. You have a statement that’s been said like… Benji was born on [July 22nd] … and to prove that he would have, like, a birth certificate to prove it, which would mean like, you know, that’s that, that’s the fact.

Mr. Cohen: What it sounds like you’re saying you need like a primary source.

Anya: Yeah, yeah, that.

Ari: I really liked… George Orwell’s 1984, when he was talking about… whether the truth really matters. And of course it does matter… to all of the characters, right? Like the final thing that they ask you to dismiss as the truth of your eyes and ears.

Mr. Cohen: Is a fact about majority acceptance? Is that what makes a fact a fact?

Isaac: No, because that goes directly contrary to like the other definition of facts that we’ve talked about before, which is a fact is something that can be basically verified.

Next, students work together to determine whether the assigned political ads contain statements of facts; whether these statements are true enough for the ad to be posted on social media; and how the threshold for ‘true enough’ should be defined.² Listening in, Lepore is impressed. She’s struck by the students’ seriousness and sense of responsibility, their respect for the gravity of the exercise, their genuine concern for doing it well, and their evident effectiveness:

The high school history students … were about the most thoughtful commentators on the problem of political misinformation that I had ever come across… they’d set high standards, clear standards, hard rules. They challenged one another. They were willing to change their minds. These kids brought to this assignment a whole lot of savvy and energy, and an extraordinary capacity to look beyond their own views to think about the needs of everyone; the public.

I’m reminded of another American high school history teacher, Avram Barlowe, who leads sophisticated classroom inquiries on controversial topics, and whose impeccable facilitation skills have been a model for me and my colleagues. In interviews, Barlowe has spoken about his search for timely, provocative, multi-perspectival materials and his extensive preparation of questions and speculative arguments in anticipation of the cases his students might make. “At the end of the lesson there’s no clear conclusions, but there’s a lot of clear arguments, and I like kids to leave with those arguments in their minds, as connected to the material that we’ve looked at,” Barlowe says [paywall]. “They’re learning how to support their ideas with evidence. They’re learning how to … refine their ideas when their ideas are challenged, or modify them — even change them — if someone else’s argument convinces them.”³

The promise of a hopeful future shaped by clear, refined and convincing arguments stands in stark contrast to Shepheard’s allegorical vision of public discourse reduced to the cacophonous shouting of contradictions across a valley: 

It’s an ancient valley, which was once full of the monuments of civilisation… A huge glacier has swept down the valley, scraping it clean, scraping it back to clear rock, and the people are left standing on the rocks, shouting at each other…  Gradually, as each successive argument has been discredited, the floor of the valley has become cluttered with superseded ideas, so it feels, sometimes, that we’re up to our necks in rubbish.

I’ve heard this metaphor before, this notion of too many broken ideas cluttering the landscape. So long as we’re still stranded out on the rocks, picking our way through the detritus of failed arguments, we may as well chew on philosopher Damon Young’s insight, informed by research in behavioural economics: “When we’re paralysed, it’s often not because we have too few ideas but too many: We have to clear away all the unreliable, unhelpful thoughts, and grab the one that will move us well.”

Notes

¹ The Last Archive podcast is inspired, in part, by a class on the history of evidence that Lepore teaches at Harvard Law School.

² The lesson plan is available for free download.

³ In a paper I co-authored with Grace Lockrobin, ‘Against directive teaching in the moral Community of Inquiry: A response to Michael Hand‘, you’ll find my analysis of part of a dialogue transcribed from one of Barlowe’s classes. 

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This is the first post in my two-part series ‘Podcasting about post-truth’. You can read the second post here.

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The Philosophy Club works with students and teachers to develop a culture of critical and creative thinking through collaborative inquiry and dialogue.