When Corrections Fail

Shared reality, once the default assumption of civic life, now feels quaint. It’s not just that people disagree on how to interpret facts. It’s that they increasingly don’t agree that the facts occurred at all.” – Professor RJ Starr

Step from the left to the right, or from the right to the left, in today’s political or cultural media landscape, and the first thing that becomes apparent is the difference in what counts as news. The top story of the day, depending on the news channel or publication, algorithm or social network, can be worlds apart. When interest and outrage do converge on some major news event, they may as well be mirror universes, taking in and regurgitating vastly different interpretations of what transpired, who said what, and what it all means.

Beyond differences of values or opinions, modern public debate now wrestles more than ever with facts themselves. No matter the topic, from seed oils to vaccines to global conflicts, each political and cultural camp has crafted its own arsenal of facts. No longer merely the evidence-based data points of yore, modern-day “facts” are the raw material for narratives shaped to fit a particular worldview.

Despite an information-rich media landscape that presents an answer for everything, those answers more often than not fall into perpetual dispute. The well-documented erosion of institutional trust over the past decades in the West has led to an inevitable loss of authority to define truth. The result is that the search for truth—even the idea of truth—has transformed into a battleground, one in which every fact must fight for survival.

These divergent realities and the resulting polarization reflect a dramatic loss of shared cognitive orientation. The disintegration of the communal mental map has left the idea of a shared reality in freefall, and with no agreed-upon handholds for a common understanding, the cognitive safety net disappears beneath. The outcome is a populace that becomes unable to mobilize collaboratively around concrete challenges.

When Corrections Do Not Land

There is an old saying that goes, “A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on,” and while it remains true, it is becoming increasingly likely that when the truth does catch up, it will slam into a well-polished partisan wall of resistance. Of course, people sometimes do update their beliefs after seeing corrections, but studies of political misinformation show that partisan divides still remain strong barriers to truth.

Opposing political or cultural positions often arise from very different assumptions about motives, context, and risk. If people’s starting points sit too far apart, the same piece of information can enter two different mental worlds, changing shape and function inside each one. Within a dogmatic worldview, corrections will not steer the course but loop into thought-terminating clichés such as “biased media,” “rigged systems,” or “out-of-touch elites.”

In a social media–driven age defined by algorithms and echo chambers, it is easy to usher oneself into a preferred reality, as, no matter the belief, there is affirmation for it online. This leaves the faith invested in the solve-all fact-check to clean up information chaos caught in a downward spiral of diminishing returns. People in the modern era, as it turns out, do not actually lack access to accurate facts; it is that they make choices around them, even in spite of them at times.

Fact-checks are no longer the bridge from ignorance they once were, but are now loaded with cultural baggage. What can present as a neutral correction from one angle can appear as a partisan manoeuvre or a cloaked attack from another. Rather than illuminate an informational void, when fact-checks meet partisan dogma, they can end up stoking divisiveness and ultimately become a testing ground for belonging.

The Backfire Effect

The term “backfire effect” describes when a correction makes belief in a false claim even stronger rather than weaker. If people distrust the source of new information, especially when that information clashes sharply with core worldviews, they will reject it. It will come across as a threat to identity or group loyalty, and become the instigator of a double-down rather than a reconsideration.

Corrections can, and regularly do, operate as a signal about who belongs, who can speak, and whose version of reality is allowed to stand. That is why the same fact-check can soften misperceptions in one setting while driving people deeper into defensive narratives in another.

Ballot Box Fallout

The recent 2024 U.S. election cycle was a high-stakes showdown between disinformation and correction within a fragmented information landscape. While distortion and outright lying have been par for the course in the political arena for a long time, the sheer rate at which untruths went unchallenged and gained technological propulsion put institutions and news agencies on the back foot. U.S. and foreign-organised campaigns pushed misleading stories about candidates, immigration, crime, and the economy across social media, talk shows, and rallies. Journalists, independent fact-checkers, and official institutions did challenge many of these claims, but these challenges were hemmed in by partisan divides. Too often, provocative narratives had already taken hold and still shaped how large groups of voters saw the race and its candidates.

Prior to the election, trust in news organizations was already low. Compounded with the knowledge that digital tools make it easy to create convincing fake or highly selective content, a fact-check does not arrive as a neutral clarification for everyone. For some, it is enough evidence that reporters and institutions still work; however, with the proliferation of deepfakes and fraudulent studies, that is seen as increasingly naïve. For others, it affirms the media as master manipulator, which in turn can be viewed as feeding a stubborn paranoia. The same corrective story can very easily support two opposite beliefs.

U.S. 2024 election-night rumours followed the same pattern. Slow vote counts or routine administrative steps were framed as normal procedure by some, while others declared them signs of fraud. It all depended on the story people already lived inside. When institutions release explanations, those messages help only if listeners see those institutions as legitimate sources of truth. Without that basic trust, each new explanation turns into fresh material for new doubts and suspicions.