Teen Fact-Checkers In India Don't Have Time For B.S.
On the launch of the Teen Fact-Checking Network.
A 17-year-old teenager looked me in the eye through the Zoom interface and asked, “Why is the Teen Fact-Checking Network there in the first place?” (or words to that effect). This was during an interview that me and my colleagues were conducting to assess her candidacy, and the teen on the other side was not supposed to be asking us questions that are the equivalent of but papa tell me why is the sky blue?
A perfectly adequate answer to both questions, as some parents will tell you, is because it is. Or simply, because! (Said with the finality of a sentence being ended.)
Instead, I said something like, “there are two reasons why the Teen Fact-Checking Network exists. One, a bunch of people somewhere found some money and wanted to do something worthwhile with it. Two, another bunch of people somewhere really care a lot that teenagers learn how to think independently and spot misinformation.”
At a fundamental level, both answers are true. For anything good to happen, someone has to have the money…and that money has to be used to make it happen.
Thinking about the interview later on, I thought it was the right answer (phew). Because there is one thing you should never do to a teenager, which is bullshit them. Especially if you’re training them to spot bullshit.
Speaking of which, we at BOOM are launching a Teen Fact-Checking Network! This week, we’re finishing the selection of 10 teenagers across India who will learn to
spot ‘fake news’,
verify whether something is true or not,
learn how to speak on camera,
edit videos and,
distribute them.
We’re doing this in partnership with the good folks at MediaWise, which is an initiative of the Poynter Institute which also runs the International Fact-Checking Network.
We got 108 applications and we whittled the list down to 15. We will further drill down to 10, which is tough on the other 5 because they are just as good as anyone else in the cohort.
The project ends in September. Hopefully by then, we would have got a couple of dozen fact-checks on video, and a van-load of teens fully trained up.
Next week, I’ll be publishing The Kumbalangi Test: Finding Healthy Masculinity at the Movies. It will likely hit your inboxes earlier than the usual Sunday.
Bullshitting teenagers sets them up for failure, something many folks did to earlier generations. It’s good to see the efforts to reverse that trend for teenagers today.