Bringing truth to political campaigns

1. Bringing truth to political campaigns Daniel Soto Morfín

2. Challenge • Reduce the number of falsehoods spread during political campaigns Why it matters? • False campaign speech inhibits voter turnout and alienates the citizenry from the political process, which is damaging to a democratic system (Marshall 2004, 285) • Negative campaigning tends to reduce feelings of political efficacy, trust in government, and perhaps even satisfaction with government itself (Rovner and Lau, 2005)

3. Background • Only 46% of Americans trust men and women who “either hold or are running for public office” (Gallup 2013) • Political parties in Mexico are some of the less trusted institutions (ConsultaMitofsky 2012) • In the last Presidential campaign, of the 202 Mitt Romney statements PolitiFact had evaluated by November 5 of that year, at least 32 percent were judged “mostly false” and “false”, with “pants-on-fire” (pure fantasy) statements accounting for an additional 9 percent (Corn 2012) • Of the 452 Barack Obama statements reviewed, 26 percent fell into the “false” or “mostly false” category, and two percent were “pants-on-fire” untruths”

4. Implementation options (to explore) • Open database of political speeches, ads and debates and allow people hyperlink sources to those statements. • These sources could refute or support the statements, improving the quality of public deliberation • Fact checking supported by compelling interactive visualization • Change legislation: increase disincentives to lying in campaigns • Create a rating to measure political campaigns’ falsehoods • Increase the number of public opportunities to refute politicians’