This project was done in collaboration with Miguel Paz and Laurie Penny.

The issue that we chose to focus on was suggested by Laurie, who had a strong interest in the topic. We focused on the fallacies that the incumbent Conservative party in Britain have been stating in order to paint the last 5 years of their governance in a positive light as elections loom. We wanted to combat these statements by showing how policies enacted in the last several years have actually made many people’s lives worse off, except for those in the top percentages.

We wished to make the presentation interactive to allow users to take a part in shaping the information they receive, which may make them more receptive to the information that is presented. We also strove to frame the quiz at the outset in a neutral way. We added interactivity by building a quiz that asks the user about their circumstances. The answer to the question “Have the last five years been a recovery or crisis?” depends on the circumstances that a user puts in. We didn’t have time to completely finish the quiz as of this post, so many pertinent questions are currently omitted and the answers are only partially written. Ideally, we would also have a meta-analysis at the bottom that allows you to quickly see how your results compare to other people’s results.

The quiz is available here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/axz/quizlet/quiz.html

It is written using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The code is available here: https://github.com/amyxzhang/quizlet

In March 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea, President Obama said something in a speech in Brussels that was perceived as untrue by Serbian media, but was not reported at all by US news outlets. The quote in the picture below was the basis for my attempt at debunking Obama’s claim. I used Canva to make a PDF: Kosovo -referendum-

Updated at 17:10

As a journalist, I’ve written about climate change long enough to know that no matter what is your approach to tackle the issue, you will always face some comment of disagreement. I’ve tried everything: longs stories, short stories, beautiful explanatory graphics, bullet key points, pure scientific stories, stories with the human side. You name it. Still there were always some people insisting in don’t believe in it. Period.

This feeling was reinforced when I heard this 14 year old girl, Erin Gustafson, maintain her disbelief in what she calls as a “propaganda” even after a very long explanation with the best scientific knowledge about climate change available today. I had the impression that she simply chose not accept, even with a professor answering absolutely all her questions.

So I had what I thought a brilliant idea. Reach as many climate scientists and communicators as I could to ask their help with this challenge using a new strategy: a tweet with 140 characters trying to convince a skeptical, denier, disbeliever – whatever name you prefer – about climate change.

My intention was to have a nice collection of strong sentences and then work with them in same graphic way. Following the suggestions of “The Debunking handbook”, I imagined the tweets could be effective for at least two aspects: would focus on the facts and be simple enough to be more cognitively attractive. I also suggested them to use not just science, but also emotions and values in their sentences.

I sent 22 e-mails with the same request to renowned climate researchers at MIT, Harvard, Yale e from some Brazilian institutions as well to a few climate communicators from NGOs. Seriously, 22! Hoping that I could get maybe 10. But the result surprised me negatively:

3 positive answers

1 traditional answer suggesting me some papers, but without a tweet

1 “interesting idea, I will think about it”

1 “ I’d be glad to help but I am dealing with a medical emergency with my daughter”

1 “I’m not sure I can reduce this argument to 140 characters”

1 “If I understand correctly, you are asking Prof. XXX to distill mountains of data into a single sentence?”

I guess the last answer was probably what some of the others also thought because the rest 16  14 people invited to participate in this challenge just decided to ignore me.

In a sincere appreciation to those three (two Brazilian researchers and one environmentalist that were my sources in several occasions) who gave me answers (more than one, in fact), I will share them here.

“Believe in science or not, reducing emissions, pollution, preparing ourselves for severe weather is unreservedly good. It is about your and mine welfare.”
Carrlos Rittl, environmentalist, Observatório do Clima

“The problem with deniers is not lack of information. Some of them are paid for the fossil fuel industry, so their concerns are economical not scientific”
Paulo Artaxo, professor of Environmental Physics, University of Sao Paulo, and member of IPCC

Wei-Hock Soon, scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have been claiming that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. Released documents showed he has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade.

“What about we try to build a sustainable society considering the responsible use of natural resources?”
Paulo Artaxo, professor of Environmental Physics, University of Sao Paulo, and member of IPCC

“The extreme events are getting more frequents. The number of days with temperatures above 34ºC has been growing exponentially since 1990.”
Eduardo Assad, agronomist, Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa)

***

I think my unsuccessful task can at least bring some thoughts for discussion. I wasn’t expecting to explain the entire issue just in 140 characters. But imagine something like a campaign in Twitter. If hundreds of smart people, with strong messages, started tweeting these messages with hashtags like #thinkclimate, #changeyourmind, #climatematters. It wouldn’t just be one sentence, but many. Honestly I think could be a powerful thing.

Of course that by myself, for the sake of this assignment, I could have found hundreds of facts to present here as a truth claims about climate change. Just for the record, for me, one of the most eloquent is this:

2014 was the warmest year since 1880. The 10 warmest years in the record, with the exception of 1998, have now occurred since 2000.

But my intention was to use real people, that dedicate their lives to this issue, to help me think in a different way to convince people. I guess the idea of a tweet may have sound offensive and almost absurd. But what shocked me was to find almost no one willing to try something new. At least not here in a school project.

Some public officials have been sounding the alarm about a type of crime they say goes unpunished and has devastating consequences for American democracy. These officials have proposed laws in recent years to prevent instances of this crime, but their critics have said that those laws are an overreaction to a tiny problem and that the proposed laws do far more harm than what they’re trying to prevent.

Before we talk about the complicated details about this issue, let’s try to understand how prevalent this specific crime — let’s call it X for now — is by comparing it to more commonly discussed violations of the law.

The FBI compiled the statistics on the violent crimes, and in America there are thousands or millions of instances of these crimes per year. But X is so rare that there are no centralized records of it. An expert on the subject found there were at most only 22 “credible cases” of X between 2000 and 2010, and only 9 more from 2010-2014. Virtually all other analyses find similarly miniscule rates of X. But it’s not a violent or high profile type of crime.

So what is X and why are some politicians so worried about it?

We’re talking about in-person voter impersonation — the possibility that someone would vote using the name and voter registration of someone else, or perhaps the identity of a deceased person. It doesn’t sound like a very effective way to cheat an election and, not surprisingly, is therefore almost never attempted.

Of course, politicians are right to want to ensure that elections are fair and equitable, and if there were a massive epidemic of impersonation, a swift response would be appropriate. After all, in today’s often close elections, even a few tenths of percentage points can make a difference to the outcome. But the “problem” of impersonation in elections is so rare as to have almost no effect.

Even if all 31 of the possible instances of voter misrepresentation in the past 15 years were actually criminal attempts to cheat the vote rather than simple clerical errors, and even if they all had occurred together in even the closest national election during that period, they couldn’t have changed the outcome. In fact, there were 1 billion votes cast during that period, meaning in-person voter fraud accounted for at most .000000031 percent of those votes.

To put it another way, comparing the ratio of impersonated votes to real votes is like comparing your running speed to the speed of light.

Well, even if it’s not a big problem, what’s wrong with still trying hard to prevent it?

Most politicians who say they want to crack down on this type of unlawful voting do so by proposing new, strict laws that require people to have certain types of identification — often photo ID — to vote.

In 2014, 31 states had standing laws requiring some form of ID. Many new laws have been added since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder to strike down part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act designed to prevent discriminatory voting laws.

But these laws aren’t harmless. Many people don’t have the right kind of ID already, and getting that ID might be too expensive for some, putting up high practical barriers to people who want to exercise their constitutional right to vote.

A study by a bipartisan government group, the Government Accountability Office, found that 5 to 16 percent of people lacked proper identification depending on the state. It also found that after some states implemented strict voter ID laws, voter turnout decreased as much as two percent or more.

In particular, this type of ID law seem to discriminate against poor people and people from racial minority groups.

From the same study, the direct costs of obtaining the type of ID could range from $14.50 to $58.50, a more significant burden for those of limited means.

In one of the studies considered by the GAO’s analysis, 85 percent of whites versus 81 percent of African-Americans had the correct type of ID. In a study by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, just 8 percent of white respondents who didn’t vote in the 2008 general election cited having the wrong ID as a “major” or “minor” factor in not doing so, compared to 24 percent of Blacks, 28 percent of Latinos, and 78 percent of Asians.

So what are proponents of voter ID laws really trying to do?

There’s evidence that the people proposing strict voter ID laws have more sinister motives. Almost all those proposing stricter voter ID laws are Republicans, and those people less likely to have proper ID and therefore have a higher bar to voting under such laws tend to lean Democrat.

According to the Caltech/MIT study, almost 16 percent of Democrat non-voters cited having the wrong ID as a “major” or “minor” factor for not voting in the 2008 general election, compared to about 9 percent for Republicans.

More importantly, some of the people in favor of such laws admit their intentions. One Pennsylvania lawmaker said an ID law, later struck down, would allow Republican Mitt Romney to win the state in the 2012 presidential election.

What’s the takeaway?

We should be skeptical of those who use vague fears to pass laws that restrict people’s freedom to vote.

Further reading:

UFO Sightings Are More Common Than Voter Fraud

[Comments: I went into this expecting to do a lot of charts/visualizations/maps, but then realized that a number of the sources I was looking at did a great job with the subject, but these would simply never be seen by people with pre-decided views on the subject. So instead I decided to just link to them in the piece without even mentioning the parts of the issue that could turn people off until I had tried to draw in the reader, and then colorfully convey the extent of the “problem” before going into a more detailed argument about the laws. I can’t really tell if the technique works well or if it comes off as patronizing, so feedback is appreciated. I also made sure to avoid using the term “voter fraud,” because it is politically charged and because voter ID laws are irrelevant to the type of voting fraud that is most common.]

This week, Carol and I wanted to explore the idea of conveying complex scientific information while debunking some common misconceptions on display technology.

In the upcoming day(s), we’ll work on creating a more immersive presentation that employs parallax, but for now, check out our thoughts on Medium: https://medium.com/@biancadatta/this-is-not-a-hologram-324310087bcc