How PolitiFact improves trust on social media (and how you can do it in your newsroom, too)

At PolitiFact, we’ve done a lot to build trust with our readers.

We explain our fact-checking mission and process in both written and video format. We reveal who donates to nonprofit newsrooms. List the sources for each fact check. We publish both positive and negative feedback from our readers.

Independence and transparency are at the heart of journalism, especially when it comes to fact-checking journalism. Readers need to understand how journalists decide which statements to fact-check, and they examine sources and analyze data to reach their conclusions.

Still, from time to time I get comments on social media like, “Why don’t these pants burn?” “Who’s funding you?” and the classic “Who’s going to fact-check the fact-checkers?”

PolitiFact strives to be as open as possible about how decisions are made in the reporting and ratings process, said editor-in-chief Katie Saunders.

“This may be our fifth presidential election, but we want every voter considering their choices this election to know what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.” “I can’t imagine understanding every detail,” she said.

Building audience trust on social media is difficult. Journalists have limited space and time to convey information on a platform that fosters engagement across contexts. Also, getting readers to click through and engage with your story from social media platforms can be difficult.

So how can news organizations build trust with audiences who only casually engage with their content? PolitiFact’s Audience team works with top-of-the-funnel audiences (i.e., through search and social media) We started a test-and-learn sprint to figure out how we could explain our mission to people who discovered our work.

Josie Hollingsworth, Audience Director at PolitiFact, said: ‘It’s important for fact checkers to be flexible and open to constant feedback about how our work is being received by our audiences. ” he said. “At the same time, we need to document appropriate processes and procedures so that we can explain the ‘why’ of what we do in many ways.”

While our sprint was primarily focused on Facebook and Instagram audiences, some of the techniques we tested were focused on website audiences. Every two weeks for 100 days, we experimented with different trust-building techniques, including:

• Link to principles page in Facebook comment
• Creating graphics about our mission and rating system
• Create a vertical video explaining our mission and process
• Responding to social media commenters
• And a link to the methodology page that ranks high in all fact checks.

The challenge we faced was how to define what success looks like for this sprint. Measures of reach, such as page views and reach, are not necessarily measures of trust. People who visit our principles page have no confidence in PolitiFact. People who never engage with our social media posts are likely to trust us deeply.

We decided to use Net Promoter Score as a baseline measure of social media credibility. Net Promoter Score measures loyalty by asking participants how likely they are to recommend a brand or product to a friend on a scale of 1 to 10. The percentage of detractors (those who answered 0-6) is subtracted from the percentage of promoters (those who answered 9-10). Scores above 0 are considered good and scores above 50 are considered good.

The goal of this experiment was to increase your social media net promoter score by 10% in 100 days. In June, we looked at our Facebook and Instagram Stories audiences and calculated a Social Media Net Promoter Score of 46. I needed 51 to reach my goal.

In the final week of the sprint, we surveyed the same social media audience that we initially surveyed in our June report. The final Net Promoter Score was 52, beating our goal by one point.

There are three main points.

1. Choose our moment. Not surprisingly, when combined with high-interest topics such as the premiere of “The Sound of Freedom” and the first debate of the Republican presidential primary, interest in the trust business grew even more. As PolitiFact looks forward to big events like the State of the Union and the first presidential debate, we’re making plans for how to share the process with a variety of audiences.
2. We make our trust work more accessible. We recognize that if our readers discover PolitiFact’s work through social media or internet searches, they may not know that all of these transparency resources exist. We are currently making our process pages more accessible with Stories, answering questions from our social media followers, and inviting questions from our audience.
3. Remember the quiet ones. For every noisy social media troll in our comments section, there is a quiet observer who takes in what we publish and forms their own opinion. When sharing our process or answering burning questions, our goal is to be a “respectful skeptic,” one who is willing to consider the evidence and appreciate learning more about our process. It’s about reaching people.

In this article, we provided PolitiFact readers with strategies, goals, and motivations for building reader trust in the future.

If all of this sounds like something you’d like to try in your newsroom, here are some tips.

• Build trustwork into your newsroom culture (if you haven’t already). Does your news organization have an “About Us” page? Have you placed your mission, process, or funding in a place where your audience can easily access it? If not, or do you know of one? If you think it would be more useful, consider how you can explain your newsroom’s approach to journalism to your audience. If you don’t know where to start, Trusting News is a great resource for news editors looking to earn trust and build credibility in their communities. PolitiFact has partnered with them to share our mission and fact-checking process with our readers. Once you have this information in front of your readers (and your newsroom), it becomes easier to identify what and how you can share it.
• Tailor your trust building to different audiences. Think about how your audience will find your work and how you can meet them where they are. If people find your work through search, could you elaborate on your values ​​in your story or add a transparent box to your web design? If one of your posts is doing well on social media? , try answering questions in the comments section or create content that explains the process in detail. If you want to encourage engagement with your newsletter readers, ask them what they want to know about the newsletter process and coverage.
• Make transparency part of your strategy. If your newsroom has an important event coming up or a big story coming out, have a plan in place to explain the reporting and reporting process. When PolitiFact visited New Hampshire for the recent primary elections, we took our readers behind the scenes and explained how we cover the candidates. Of course, sometimes big news happens when you least expect it. If your organization is reporting breaking news and you have time, see what people are asking you on social media or add context to your current coverage on how to approach the news. please.

Sanders said newsrooms shouldn’t hide their work when examining how much effort they put into stories and their conclusions.

“They should be transparent about the time it took, the number of people they talked to, and their decision to proceed in the first place,” she says. “I think all of that should be clear to the reader.”