Yeah, that sounds right to me. And reminds me of a paper I read when working on that experiment, the abstract of which was:
Does external monitoring improve democratic performance? Fact-checking has come to play an increasingly important role in political coverage in the United States, but some research suggests it may be ineffective at reducing public misperceptions about controversial issues. However, fact-checking might instead help improve political discourse by increasing the reputational costs or risks of spreading misinformation for political elites. To evaluate this deterrent hypothesis, we conducted a field experiment on a diverse group of state legislators from nine U.S. states in the months before the November 2012 election. In the experiment, a randomly assigned subset of state legislators was sent a series of letters about the risks to their reputation and electoral security if they were caught making questionable statements. The legislators who were sent these letters were substantially less likely to receive a negative fact-checking rating or to have their accuracy questioned publicly, suggesting that fact-checking can reduce inaccuracy when it poses a salient threat.
Relatedly, it could be that āmoreā or ābetterā fact-checking would lead to better actions by or discourse from politicians, even if voters ādonāt really care muchā about fact-checks or never really see them, due to politicians overestimating what impact fact-checks would have on votersā perceptions.
(To be clear, I do think fact-checks probably have at least some impact via the more obvious route too; I wonder mostly about the magnitude of the effect, not whether it exists.)
Yeah, that sounds right to me. And reminds me of a paper I read when working on that experiment, the abstract of which was:
Relatedly, it could be that āmoreā or ābetterā fact-checking would lead to better actions by or discourse from politicians, even if voters ādonāt really care muchā about fact-checks or never really see them, due to politicians overestimating what impact fact-checks would have on votersā perceptions.
(To be clear, I do think fact-checks probably have at least some impact via the more obvious route too; I wonder mostly about the magnitude of the effect, not whether it exists.)