That’s the journalistic conundrum of the misinformation age. Ignore false allegations, and they can fester and spread in the shadows. Shine a light on it, and you might help amplify it.
This isn’t a new dilemma — journalists were unsure how to cover the smear campaign about John McCain’s so-called “love child” or the insidious lie about president Barack Obama’s religion.
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But social media has turbocharged the spread of misinformation, and journalists have less and less time to respond and fight the barrage of fake news posts. And as we enter into a local election season, the stakes keep getting higher.
So, how do you debunk a lie without spreading it?
In a 2018 white paper about what she called the “the oxygen of amplification,” Whitney Phillips suggested better editorial practices for journalists when reporting on extremists, antagonists, and manipulators online. Her recommendations included rigorously assessing newsworthiness, avoiding unnecessary amplification of false or harmful information, and always providing clear context. Phillips noted that our current media ecosystem — driven by analytics, engagement metrics, and rapid news cycles — encourages the spread of sensational or emotionally charged stories.
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Claire Wardle, associate professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University who studies user-generated content, verification, and misinformation, told me in an interview that it’s actually a “problem if journalists never touch this stuff,” meaning falsehoods. There’s a role for warning people, she explained. “There’s now a lot of work on pre-bunking, which is about helping people ahead of a known rumor. So, you would say, ‘it is likely in this next mayoral election that you are going to see rumors particularly related to one of the candidates’ ethnicity,’ ” referring to the post about Wu.
“Whenever you see candidates who are women or women of color, you often see their identities used against them. It’s often in local races,” Wardle said. “The argument is that, by giving people warning, you’re saying, ‘You’re going to see rumors circulating in small community groups, so be aware.’ You’re trying to build resilience so you’re not ignoring it.”
(Wu’s main opponent, Josh Kraft, is Jewish — and in the current environment, you should probably be prepared for mis- and disinformation about him, too.)
I reached out to the self-described journalist on whose page I saw the viral post (it has more than 14,000 shares and nearly 20,000 reactions on Facebook) with the wild allegation about Wu and asked her about her sourcing. She didn’t respond by deadline. But it appears to be based on a Daily Caller article that said Wu “received hundreds of thousands of dollars” in 2021 from a named individual alleged to have ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Such a donation would be illegal; only much later in the piece does the article detail that the donations actually came from members of the Chinese American community.
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In an email, a spokesperson for Wu told me that the named individual is a US citizen who is civically active, is part of the state’s Asian American and Pacific Islanders Commission, and has donated to many candidates over the years (including $3,200 to Wu since 2021). The spokesperson added that all of the donations the mayor has received over her 12 years in elected office are publicly disclosed online through the Massachusetts Office of Campaign and Political Finance.
Wardle told me that misinformation tends to grow in local communities because people have an emotional tie to their neighborhoods. As for strategies to cope with potential misinformation, she recommends audiences “just stop and recognize that people who are trying to fool us are taking advantage of our emotions.”
Other recommendations include doing a Google search to see if other newsrooms have mentioned the potential fake news post in question; reading laterally — meaning to read many different sources on the same topic; and visiting the “About” page of the news site to learn more about who’s behind it and when it was established.
In the end, the best defense against disinformation may be transparency — not just from politicians, but from journalists too. That means acknowledging the risk of repeating a lie, while also trusting readers enough to tell them the truth about why we’re calling it out. But responsible debunking — grounded in facts, context, and care — is still journalism’s best answer.
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This is an excerpt from ¡Mira!, a Globe Opinion newsletter from columnist Marcela García. Sign up to get ¡Mira! in your inbox each week.
Marcela García is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at marcela.garcia@globe.com. Follow her on X @marcela_elisa and on Instagram @marcela_elisa.
