Fact checking is exhausting
One of the truisms of social media is that fastest finger first does not mean fast finger is being honest. Facts, or an honest narrative of data and facts, are there to be discussed and dissected, yet while you would hope most people are acting in good faith, the majority of people do not have the time to fact check everything they read on social media. We all have to rely on a degree of trust, to trust that the person posting a “fact” or information is doing so with the best of intentions. Yet, the reality is that misinformation runs rampant, either through honest misunderstanding or through deliberate attempts at misleading and misdirecting readers.
This is not just a left or right problem, it is a human cognitive problem. We only have a certain bandwidth to digest and interpret information, relying on our own maps of the world to make sense of all the disparate signals we receive every day. No person can know everything, and even an all seeing AI would never know everything about the human condition. Education only gets you so far, you need to be open to building bridges to new ideas, while also critically engaging with them to ensure you are not just accepting something at face value.
So far, so academic of me. Each of us only has a limited amount of time to engage with information, and simply stating to others that need to critically think comes across as patronising. It is first year undergraduate 101, yet it is also weaponised by folk like Matt Walsh and Jordan Peterson who encourage their audiences to by hyper critical of anything outside their worldview. Conspiracy theories start with critical thinking, but instead of learning and growing conspiracy theorists double down on the doubt, fitting the evidence to suit their own ideas. Thinking critically means being open to change, open to ideas that make you unformattable, that potentially cause you to shift your perspective.
Which is why fact checking can get exhausting. As a trans rights researcher my first repost to any exclusionary feminist is show me the evidence, show me the data, not the headlines you are cribbing from Twitter and the first Google result. If they present me with a source I will then read it and see what the original dataset was and what the original source’s political persuasion is. This is time consuming, taking minutes where the original tweet or post was seconds. Minorities should not have to justify their existence, yet in doing the fact checking they do all the labour.
The onus is always on the minority to be better, smarter, respectable lest one of them commits a crime and they all get tarred. Trans women are condemned for the sexual predations of a handful of gender non-conforming individuals, told that we are sexual predators waiting to happen. Overcoming these distortions, fighting back against the tsunami of exclusionary misinformation is a full time job, and most trans folk simply do not have the time or energy to fact check everything.
Black folk have long known this, and there is much black feminism written dissecting this issue. Two conclusions are currently being played out: either do not engage or fight back with all the energy you can muster. Trans folk have never had a moment of peace in the long history of gender non-conforming identities, we have always been demonised, so simply not engaging is only possible if you are given the space to just live. It is a form of privilege, yet it is one that is completely understandable. Each of us has to make our own judgement where to stand and when to walk away, there should never be finger pointing and accusations of not doing enough.
This matters to me because this is my job. I am paid to research trans rights, paid to explore English law, and paid to create a media dataset of trans and gender non-conforming articles. I have the evidence, I have the data, I know these issues better than most, yet if I spent all my time fact checking Twitter posts it would still only be a drop in the sewer that is social media. It is worth my time engaging, but not worth my time getting emotionally invested. These are my limits, my lines in the sand. I have the privilege to engage, privilege to stand up for the basic rights and dignity of all trans folk. Yes, it can be mentally exhausting, but if I can make even a sliver of change it is worth it.
