Facts, alternative facts, and fact checking in times of post-truth politics

Alternative Facts and the Post-Truth Society: Meeting the Challenge

In the hours following the 2017 U.S. presidential inauguration, the world was introduced to the concept of “alternative facts,” a term that quickly became synonymous with a willingness to persevere with a particular belief either in complete ignorance of, or with a total disregard for, reality.1 The increasing incidence of alternative facts in the popular and political arena creates a critical ...

Brute Facts, Social Facts, and Institutional Facts

Geographic regions (henceforth, regions for short) are spatially extended pieces of (near) earth surface that share some aspect of similarity across their extents. The most fundamental aspect of similarity shared within a region is "locational similarity"-proximity. But regions nearly always share common thematic content or activity too. That is, regions are defined not just spatially but accor...

Some Facts About Times, Events And Subjectsping

Post-decision consolidation and distortion of facts

Participants decided whom of two patients to prioritize for surgery in three studies. The factual quantitative information about the patients (e.g., probability of surviving surgery) was given in vignette form with case descriptions on Visual Analogue Scales — VAS’s. Differentiation and Consolidation theory predicts that not only the attractiveness of facts but also the mental representations o...

Data In, Fact Out: Automated Monitoring of Facts by FactWatcher

Towards computational journalism, we present FactWatcher, a system that helps journalists identify data-backed, attention-seizing facts which serve as leads to news stories. FactWatcher discovers three types of facts, including situational facts, one-of-the-few facts, and prominent streaks, through a unified suite of data model, algorithm framework, and fact ranking measure. Given an appendonly...