Inside Higher Education: “It’s International Fact-Checking Day, a project of the Poynter Institute. What a quaint concept! It’s intrinsic to good journalism, but it can’t be done by algorithm or en masse – it’s lovingly hand-crafted work in pursuit of nailing down something that’s often ambiguous and needs to be considered in context and without confirmation bias. In an era when the deadline is eternally now (newspapers are no longer put to bed, they have to be up and at ‘em 24/7) and lies travel to the top of Google search results before the truth can get its pants on, there’s little time to check the facts and few staff to do. The efforts librarians and media literacy folks have launched to help citizens sort it all out are needed, but outsourcing the work to individuals isn’t a solution any more than privacy self-defense is the fix for surveillance capitalism. Yes, we need to know how to weigh information we encounter every day, but we also need to acknowledge that it’s coming at us fast and at volume. We need some quality fact-checkers working in critical places, which means we need to support trustworthy human gatekeepers…”