At the microphone of Emmanuelle Daviet, a member of the editorial staff to enlighten our listeners on the operation of franceinfo with, this Sunday, Antoine Krempf who heads the “Vrai du faux” cell of the radio. Verification of information, fact checking, as we also say in English, tool to fight in particular against conspiracy, for example the history of vaccines which would contain a chip intended to trace us, the 5G telephone networks which would propagate the coronavirus …
With the Covid, a plateau has clearly been crossed in the belief in conspiracy theories. Beyond the disinformation around health, on different subjects, false information abound and find a public very permeable to all these hazy theories. A membership all the stronger than 67% of French people say “to doubt the veracity” information they receive, even when it comes from “recognized media”, is what an IFOP poll indicated last June.
A few months before the presidential election, in order to try to enlighten the public on these mechanisms which lead to disinformation, Emmanuel Macron installed a commission this week. This body has three months to make proposals and find solutions to deal with the grip of conspiracy theses in the public debate. But at franceinfo, we have been tackling the subject for several years now, with the “True from the False” unit.
Emmanuelle Daviet: Antoine Krempf, how does your service work?
Antoine Krempf: We are six journalists, we do both radio, obviously, but also articles on the web, videos on social networks. We are also present on channel 27, the franceinfo TV channel.
We have two missions: a verification mission, we check public speech in general, it is often the guests in the morning sessions of the media, political leaders, but also we check what is shared on social networks, on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube. This is the first mission.
The other mission is the decryption and the explanation. That is to say, we are going to contextualize, explain the stakes of a subject that is being debated in the news. And in both cases, the idea is to ensure that the public debate is based on factual elements and therefore to fight against disinformation.
There is also a daily column on the air, “The truth of the false” According to what criteria is chosen the topic of the day?
There are two chronicles “The true from the false”, from now on. Since the start of the school year, we have a chronicle in the morning, but also a chronicle in the program “The informed of the evening”. Each time, it is done by a person who does his research, who cross-checks the sources, often with the help of other journalists from the cell.
How do we choose our subjects? We choose with three criteria. For example, when it comes to social networks, virality, that is to say that it is false information that is shared a lot, a lot. There is no point in talking about something and therefore calling attention to something that is false, but shared by very, very few people. There must be a link with the public debate, that it be discussed in the news. We also wonder if, beyond knowing whether it is true or false, there must be an interest in the explanation behind it, that the people listening to us learn something on a subject of public debate.
On the occasion of this year of the presidential campaign, does the editorial staff of franceinfo plan to verify live the words of political personalities interviewed in the studio?
So no, for several reasons. I’ll give you one: the danger of doing it live is to go too fast and therefore make mistakes. It is a problem, when one calls oneself “the true of the false”, it is often very long to verify an affirmation. You have to be sure you have fully understood the context of this statement, which sometimes involves calling the person back to find out if you have understood what they mean. You also have to find the right sources to verify.
We often manipulate figures, we, within the cell, the true from the false, and the figures, we must also be able to understand them, know how they were made, the methodology behind, which often also involves to call experts. Us, for a column, we often spend the day to prepare two minutes on the air, and it is sometimes very short.
You launched “The truth of the false junior” a week ago, what is the principle of this new meeting?
It’s every Friday, 2:20 p.m. and 4:20 p.m. In fact, we answer on the air and if necessary, with specialists or journalists, to the questions that the middle school or high school students ask themselves on posts, videos, statements, rumors that they see pass in particular on the social networks. We explain to them how, on this rumor, we would work, the steps we take to find out if a rumor or a post is true or false.
And then, for us, it’s very interesting because it’s a window on lots of new subjects, because they have a way of consuming information that is a little different, and it gives us the opportunity to make subjects. I’ll give you just one example: last week, we had a lot of questions from middle school and high school students about the impact of vaccination on periods and fertility, with a lot of testimonials on TIk Tok. Suddenly, we made a video and a product on the air to explain where we are, from a scientific point of view, on the impact of vaccination on the rules.