A week before the first presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the Clinton campaign put out an 18-page dossier on the never-ending geyser of lies that is Donald Trump. But with big questions surrounding how much fact-checking would be done by Lester Holt or any moderator at a debate for that matter, the Clinton campaign wanted to offer up a place where they would know the facts would be checked. In the beginning of the debate, Clinton offered it up to the 80 million-plus audience—Literally Trump, on her website. The real question is how deep can the fact-checking sites penetrate into the debate? So many websites, ours included, wanted Trump’s lies to be called out in real time because the dropoff between the amount of people watching the debate and people staying around after the debate to find out what was true or not true is a huge chasm. But according to WIRED, Clinton’s website was rather successful.
Nearly two million people visited Clinton’s website within an hour after she mentioned it. That’s 10 times as many visits as the campaign has ever attracted in an hour. By this evening, the Literally Trump factoids had been shared 18,000 times on social media.
The idea for the site was Clinton’s, according to Gayle. “In debate prep, Hillary made it clear that while she would be calling Trump out for his lies, she wanted a place where viewers could be empowered to look it up themselves, not have to wait for reporters or any other delivery mechanism,” Gayle said. “Hillary suggested making Trump’s past statements available on the website for anyone to read for themselves.”
The fact of the matter is that most Trump supporters aren’t going to go find out about Trump being a liar. They already know he is and seem to be okey dokey with that as long as he continues to support their fears of miscegenation and dirty dancing. Poynter.org reports that NPR and other news sites with “fact-checking” set ups on debate night saw millions in people trafficking their sites as well, and the public has gone back over the transcripts of the debate.
Apparently, they did just that. As of this morning, at least 6 million people had flocked to a transcript of the debate that was fact-checked by 20 NPR journalists in real-time.
The transcript, which ran more than 40 pages, was an experiment in real-time fact-checking for NPR that was weeks in the making. It proved to be an overwhelming success for the public radio network, drawing 7.4 million pageviews and delivering NPR.org's its biggest traffic day ever.
But one thing that is heartening about the above numbers, and the social media landscape, is that people are interested in checking the facts. Maybe it’s mostly for their own edification, but maybe it’s to decide how truthful statements the candidates make about one another and about the world. If you can get one relative to shut up about some baloney Donald Trump told you was true, the fact checking was worth it. It may not decide the election, but creating a society that knows what is a fact and was is not is an important step in getting a better educated citizenry. Now we just have to work on the critical thinking.
