Caption: Road sign image of Facebook and Twitter (geralt/pixabay)
So you’ve taken the plunge with the Pro-Truth Pledge: congratulations! Now how do you live your social media life after the pledge?
Going Public
The first thing to do is post on social media about taking the pledge. You can use this Facebook sharer link, this Twitter sharer link, this LinkedIn sharer link, and this Reddit sharer link to do so. If you are active on other social media, you can share it there as well using the link to the Pro-Truth Pledge website.
Next, please add this Facebook Frame to your Facebook profile image or video, and this Twibbon to your Twitter profile image. If the standard Pro-Truth Pledge frame is not aesthetically pleasing to you fro some reason, you are welcome to use this alternative PTP Facebook Frame. Please mark the Facebook Frame as “permanent,” since the main point of the frame is to show others that you took the pledge and are comfortable being held publicly accountable for your words. It’s also a way that fellow PTP-takers can recognize each other on FB, and build community. Finally, we find it’s very beneficial for encouraging one’s Facebook friends to take the pledge as well. For example, one PTP volunteer told me that after he put up his Frame, a friend of his quickly took the pledge, and he suspects the Frame is what caused it. I know that you may have other commitments as well, and want to show it with other frames: if you want to use other frames, you can use them on top of or in addition to the Pro-Truth Pledge FB Frame, but please keep that one there.
Caption: John Kirbow’s Facebook profile with Pro-Truth Pledge Facebook Frame (Courtesy of John Kirbow)
To make the frame permanent, if you are on your computer, once you click “Try It,” you should see on the bottom of the screen an option for how long you want to keep the frame. It should state “Switch back to previous profile picture in” and give you a number of options. Simply select “Never” and that’s that! If you are on your phone, you will see options on the bottom left that give you various timing options, and you can click “Permanent” there. Any time you switch your profile picture, simply go back to this link and add the Pro-Truth Pledge Facebook Frame to your new profile picture.
For your personal Facebook account, add the statement “I have taken the Pro-Truth Pledge ProTruthPledge.org: please hold me accountable” to the “About” section of your personal Facebook profile as in this example. If you have a Facebook page, please add the same statement to the “About” section of your Facebook page as in this example. For your Twitter account, please add “Took #ProTruthPledge at ProTruthPledge.org” to your Twitter bio. For your LinkedIn profile, add that you are a “Signer” of the Pro-Truth Pledge LinkedIn organization. Click the “+” button on your experience section, put in “Signer” as title, choose “Pro-Truth Pledge” as the organization, put in your date of signing, and in the description state “Because I am committed to integrity, I have taken the Pro-Truth Pledge at ProTruthPledge.org: please hold me accountable.” You can add additional information about why you chose to take the pledge and/or what kind of activities you are doing to advance the pledge as well. Where it gives you the option to add a video, you can share this video about the PTP. The big benefit for you of doing so is that your LinkedIn connections are notified of your new “experience” of being a signer of the pledge, spreading the word to your professional colleagues of your orientation toward truthfulness.
Add similar information for other social media where you have profiles. You can also add it to the sign-off message of your email. On some social media, you can have links, and that’s great, and on some you can add the hashtag, so see what works for each.
Then, please click “like” and “follow” on the official Facebook page of the Pro-Truth Pledge, and also the official page of Intentional Insights (InIn), the nonpartisan educational 501(c)3 nonprofit running the Pro-Truth Pledge project. Please “follow” the Twitter account of the Pro-Truth Pledge and the Twitter account of Intentional Insights. Also, “follow” the LinkedIn page of the Pro-Truth Pledge, and the LinkedIn page of Intentional Insights. If you are active on other social media, please take a look at the home page of Intentional Insights to see other social media you can follow.
Fighting Lies and Protecting Truth on Your Profile
So now you’ve gone public: what next?
The first thing to do is get involved with the Pro-Truth Pledge social media community. Our main collaborative venue is Facebook. Facebook groups allow Pro-Truth Pledge advocates to work together in a coordinated manner to fight lies and protect the truth. The first thing to do is join this Facebook group for InIn as a whole, called Intentional Insights Insiders. It’s the group for anyone in any way interested in InIn’s activities and mission. The group has a significant bar for entry: we make sure to check that anyone who joins is an actual human being who expressed a clear interest in the mission of the group or was invited by someone who can vouch for that person. Of course, someone can pretend an interest in the topic, and actually be trying to infiltrate and subvert the group, or less maliciously have a personality and values that make them disruptive to and undermine the community, such as expressing an excessively partisan tone. That is why we have a clear set of standards as described in the group sidebar, and the group is kept well-moderated, with substantial filtering of posts and moderation of comments. To learn more about what’s on-topic and what is not, see the general guidelines here for InIn Insiders moderators.
You will see a number of other Facebook groups linked in the top of the Intentional Insights Insiders group, and one of them is the Global Pro-Truth Pledge Advocates Facebook group. This is a smaller offshoot of the broader Intentional Insights Insiders group, and is specifically dedicated to work on the Pro-Truth Pledge itself. Only those who took the pledge may join the group. The Global Pro-Truth Pledge advocates FB group is only for discussions related explicitly to strategizing and implementing the Pro-Truth Pledge project. By contrast, Intentional Insights Insiders is for broader content related to truth and rational thinking, in politics and other life areas. So posts about lies and truth in politics in general are for the Intentional Insights Insiders group, while posts asking for advice about how to target the pledge well to a certain audience are better for the Global Pro-Truth Pledge advocates group. There are also a host of groups for local-level activism, for many states in the US and some countries: check out if you live in an area with a group by looking at the linked groups here. These groups are for discussing more regional-oriented topics related to the Pro-Truth Pledge in your geographical area.
There are other groups linked at the top of Intentional Insights Insiders, which anyone who is a member of Intentional Insights Insiders can join. One is the Intentional Insights Informal Coaching Forum Facebook group. This is a group for coaches and clients (active and prospective) of the Intentional Insights Informal Coaching program to ask general questions and discuss situations and solutions. Another is the Intentional Insights Collaborative Truth-Seeking Club Facebook group, devoted to challenging conversations, meaning ones that have the reasonable potential to arouse strong emotions, by using collaborative truth-seeking strategies. Some of the more challenging conversations and posts that are originally proposed for the Intentional Insights Insiders Facebook group are redirected here. There’s also the Intentional Insights Reading Club Facebook group, devoted to reading and discussing texts directly relevant to the InIn mission of truth-seeking, rational thinking, and wise decision-making in all life areas. If you enjoy reading and discussing long texts, that’s a good group to join.
Besides Facebook, we have a social media space for professionals, in the form of our LinkedIn group: please join that if you have a LinkedIn account. The LinkedIn group brings together a community of professionals who’ve taken the pledge and are committed to behaving in accordance with the pledge in their professional life. The group offers the opportunity to cultivate connections with others who have committed to truthful behaviors. Integrity is immensely valuable in an employee or business colleague, and it’s a shared value for everyone in the group. We encourage group members to help each other develop their careers in every way that’s consistent with the pledge. Another purpose of the group is collaborating to explain and promote the pledge to other professionals. Use the group to share your experiences, ask questions, and strategize around this effort to help others demonstrate their commitment to truth.
The Facebook and LinkedIn groups provide safe spaces to discuss lies and truth in our public discourse, and especially in politics. However, it’s also important to make an impact on your friends and family, and you taking the pledge involves a commitment to do so. Research shows that we can significantly influence those in our social networks to engage in either beneficial or non-beneficial behavior. So use your posts on social media to influence your network toward greater honesty.
It is definitely beneficial to share on all of your social media platforms the postings that you see on the official Pro-Truth Pledge and Intentional Insights pages. That gives you a double impact: not only do you spread highly accurate, fact-checked information, but you also get your network to learn about and consider investigating the Pro-Truth Pledge itself. Especially impactful for social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram are truth-oriented images, and we have a whole bunch of Pro-Truth memes for you to choose from here: share away!
Caption: Meme from the Pro-Truth meme set (Created by Wayne Straight for Intentional Insights)
Also, look at what people share in the Intentional Insights and Pro-Truth Pledge Facebook groups. Members there range across the political spectrum and orient toward truth above all, and after seeing the feedback there, you can decide what to share and what responses to make if people challenged you on the accuracy of the piece you share.
If you want to share something that has not yet been vetted in the official Pro-Truth Pledge groups, please follow our fact-checking guidelines. Also, avoid unreliable sources: a good way to do so is to use this extension for your social media and online browsing (the organization that made the app, Media Bias/Fact Check, took the Pro-Truth Pledge). You can also manually check the cites you use against this list, and this list, and this list of fake news sites, as well as more generally check out the extent of bias for any given source on the Media Bias/Fact Check website.
For each piece you share on Facebook, please add a version of the following wording in a P.S. to your post: “I took the Pro-Truth Pledge at ProTruthPledge.org, consider this article credible and the headline representative of the article: correct me if you think I might be mistaken, please!” An example is here. Doing so helps you come off as substantially more credible than someone else making a similar post, and thus impacting your connections to a greater extent. It also helps spread word about the pledge. Do the same sort of P.S. statement for other social media that allow you to do so, such as LinkedIn. While you can’t do the same thing for Twitter due to character limitations, what you can do on Twitter is add the hashtag #ProTruthPledge liberally, so please do so.
None of us are perfect, and sometimes our fact-checking efforts will fail. Never fear: that gives you a chance to practice the sixth behavior of the pledge (“reevaluate if my information is challenged, retract it if I cannot verify it”) and the twelfth behavior (“celebrate those who retract incorrect statements and update their beliefs toward the truth”). Publicly and gladly retract your statements. Do so both in the original statement itself, such as by editing the original Facebook post with an UPDATE at the very top and by commenting on your own Facebook post or tweet, and in a separate Facebook post and tweet announcing your retraction. State that you are following the pledge in your retractions, to model for your social network what they should do when they learn that they shared misinformation and again spread the word about the pledge.
If you reshared the piece of misinformation from someone else on social media, let that person or organization know, and ask them to retract their post, following the eighth behavior (“ask people to retract information that reliable sources have disproved even if they are my allies”). If you got the information from an online source, contact them to ask them to address the misinformation. Let them know that you are doing so in alignment with the Pro-Truth Pledge that you have taken, and if your efforts to get them to correct their statements succeeds, encourage them to take the pledge as well.
Fighting Misinformation Shared by Others
So far, we’ve talked about your own social media profile. What about when your friends and family post what you suspect to be misinformation?
Do not confront them with evidence about them sharing misinformation. Research suggests that, for the large majority of the population, being confronted with the evidence results in negative emotions, shutting down thinking and inspiring defensive or aggressive responses. At that point, you lost: they will not change their minds.
Instead, use curiosity to find out where they learned about that information. Ask them if they consider the source and the evidence credible. Engage them in a conversation about what it means to use credible sources and quality evidence. Establish a sense of trust and shared goals, and get them to agree that the most important thing is the facts, regardless of ideology.
Caption: Meme indicating that facts are the most important thing, not ideology, from the Pro-Truth meme set (Made by Lexie Holliday for Intentional Insights)
In the course of the conversation, once they feel safe, you may or may not share some of the evidence you may have about their post being misinformation. It’s best if they find the evidence on their own through the questions you ask, rather than being presented with the evidence by you. Their own search for evidence will help teach them the skills of fact-checking and online research, rather than just you providing them with the facts.
Note in the course of the conversation that you are following the ninth behavior of the pledge, “ask people to retract information that reliable sources have disproved even if they are my allies,” and the tenth behavior, “compassionately inform those around me to stop using unreliable sources even if these sources support my opinion.” Again, you are modeling what you preach, and also sharing about the pledge in the process. For the behavioral science research underlying this approach, and an example of this approach in play in a high-stakes public situation, see this article.
The interaction described above takes some patience and effort. It requires you to have a decent pre-existing relationship with that person, and for the other person to care at least somewhat about the truth.
What if it’s your uncle who always posts deceptive articles from Breitbart or your cousin who posts misleading memes from OccupyDemocrats, and you know based on past discussions that they won’t change their behavior? What about if it’s someone you barely know from high school, and you doubt that the effort to change their mind is going to be successful, or you simply don’t want to put in the time and effort into influencing them?
Well, there’s a meme for that. Posting a meme takes a few seconds, and makes quite a big impact. Research shows that information shared in a visual format is significantly more effective at combatting misinformation than textual information. Another study demonstrated that a major motivator for lying stems from people trying to gain the benefits of deceptive behavior while still thinking of themselves as honest. Posting a meme questioning people’s honesty thus represents an excellent, science-based way of fighting misinformation.
There are a number of Pro-Truth memes at various levels of escalation. Here is one soft one, for people with whom you have a higher concern for maintaining relationships. Say it’s your cousin who you see occasionally at family events, and with whom you want to be cordial.
Caption: Meme questioning whether something was fact-checked featuring Sherlock Holmes from the Pro-Truth meme set (Created by Wayne Straight for Intentional Insights)
Let’s say your cousin posted something more ridiculous than usual, and you want to up the ante. Here’s the meme to use.
Caption: Meme questioning whether something was fact-checked featuring gnomes from the Pro-Truth meme set (Created by Wayne Straight for Intentional Insights)
Here is a set of memes for someone whose good opinion you don’t really care about, where your primary concern is to convince onlookers to avoid believing in the post made by the person.
Caption: Meme criticizing alternative facts from the Pro-Truth meme set (Created by Jane A. Gordon for Intentional Insights)
Caption: Meme criticizing lies in politics from the Pro-Truth meme set (Created by Ed Coolidge for Intentional Insights)
Caption: Meme criticizing lies in politics from the Pro-Truth meme set (Created by Jane A. Gordon and Steven Carr for Intentional Insights)
Caption: Meme criticizing the sharing of fake news from the Pro-Truth meme set (Created by Lau Guerreiro for Intentional Insights)
The latter one is the most powerful, and most intense. For more guidelines in how to address people with irrational beliefs, see this article.
Going a step beyond, encourage other private citizens just like yourself to take the pledge by doing social media activism! For example, go to various local Facebook groups and other relevant social media to promote the PTP there. Be creative and find ways to share about it with others.
Lobbying Public Figures on Social Media
A key aspect of the Pro-Truth Pledge involves encouraging public figures and organizations to take it. You can do that through social media.
Twitter is a highly useful venue for this regard, as it’s the most public forum available. You can tweet to any politician or other public figure “.@[twitter handle] please take #ProTruthPledge at ProTruthPledge.org to fight #fakenews and #alternativefacts @ProTruthPledge” or an adapted version of this message. Keep those hashtags, they are valuable for drawing attention to your message. You can, for example, send a tweet a day to someone from this Twitter list of US congressmembers, or this list of NBC correspondents, and also find lists of your own. Consider finding a list of reporters for your local paper or TV channel, or your local politicians, and tweeting them.
Facebook is also useful, though less so, since it is not as publicly visible. There, what you would want to do is go to the pages of politicians such as from this list, or media such as from this list. Then, send them a message, saying something like “@ please take #ProTruthPledge at ProTruthPledge.org to fight #fakenews and protect #truth and #facts” and also post this in a comment on their pinned post or latest post.
The same strategies apply to organizations and public figures on LinkedIn, as well as all other social media.
If you are in the US, you have an additional tool for you to help you get your elected representatives to commit to truth via the Pro-Truth Pledge. Go to this link and put in your US address. You will get a menu with (almost) all of your elected representatives, from local to national, and the number of pledge-takers per elected representative.
Those that have easily-available Twitter accounts will have a blue “Twitter” button above and to the right of their picture. When you click on that button, you will send to each one this message: “I took the #ProTruthPledge at https://
It takes 5 seconds (literally, not figuratively) to send a tweet to each. So take 5 minutes to tweet to all of them, and repeat the same 5 minute tweeting per week. You can easily set up a Twitter account if you don’t have one. Make your voice heard and make a difference – Tweet for Truth now!
For extra activism points, you will see that many elected representatives will have their other social media and websites available when you put in your address. It won’t be a one-click matter to request they take the pledge on those venues, but you can take a minute for each and use these guidelines and templates to write them emails and Facebook messages.
We know these strategies work: a number of public figures have been convinced to take the pledge through reaching out to them on social media. For example, one of our volunteers has described how whenever anyone invites him to “like” a Facebook page from a politician, he asks whether that individual have taken the pledge. After a couple of exchanges back and forth, where he explains the pledge and follows up, about a quarter end up taking the pledge. Imagine what would happen if a quarter of all the politicians whose Facebook pages you were invited to like end up taking the pledge!
Conclusion
Following strategies will enable you to be highly effective in fighting lies and promoting truth on social media. Let us know what your experience is like and what questions you have!