https://www.comicskingdom.com/dustin
Dustin, a cartoon character, has a son who goes to elementary school. In today's cartoon, we learn that his school has a fact checker. In today's world, we have faster communication and messages from a broader range of people. Some people have a deep commitment to only sending messages they strongly believe to be true. Others have a deep commitment to messages that excite and surprise, with little regard for evidence of truth or falsity. Because of increasing communication and given the possibility that my statements, messages, pictures and comments are questioned or opposed, somebody might check my facts in an attempt to settle them as true or false.
https://www.google.com/search?q=Leading+fact+checkers
When I think of fact-checking organizations, I think of Snopes.com. That is a site I have used at times to see what they say about a certain statement. If I hear or read that Abraham Lincoln was secretly a llama farmer, I probably won't bother putting the underlined words in Google. It's possible that I could use Duckduckgo.com to see what it can tell me about a subject or question.
Some enterprising teacher may well have asked a likely student or two to be the class scuttlebutt fact-checker. I would not be surprised if some schools are developing training in fact-checking. I am sure that many academics feel they have already spent their careers in fact-checking. Many modern communicators in a broad range of subjects are experts at getting an idea across without actually making any firm statement that can be checked for truth.
In addition to deliberate use of weasel words such as
Maybe...
It might be the case that...
Some people wonder if…
statements can be quite difficult to evaluate. Many ideas are quite broad such as "____________ is the greatest man who ever lived" or, to make use of the future tense, "in 200 years, all of humanity will recognize the greatness of _____________".
Sometimes, it is said that much of education amounts to training in "critical thinking." [I just weasel-worded!] I happen to believe that a person can be overly critical of every idea and every statement and every thought. Perhaps, some of today's headaches come from too much doubt and critical thinking.
