Why I am learning to fact-check before I join the crowd

The feeling of being persuaded

I have been thinking a lot about the kind of writing that makes me stop scrolling.

It is usually confident. It is clear. It puts words around a feeling I already have but have not fully explained to myself. It may be about technology, work, politics, children, culture, money, leadership, or the state of society. It often tells me that something important has been lost, that something is being taken from us, or that a powerful group is responsible for a problem I can already feel in my own life.

I understand why this writing works. I am not outside its reach.

Like many people, I feel tired of being tracked, sold to, interrupted, subscribed, measured, and encouraged to spend more time looking at a screen. I can see that some digital products are designed to hold attention for as long as possible. I can see that some companies benefit when we keep scrolling, clicking, buying, comparing, worrying, or returning. I can see why people are concerned about children, loneliness, local communities, work pressure, and the loss of quiet time.

Those concerns are real. They should not be dismissed.

But I am learning that a feeling can be real without every conclusion built around it being true.

That may sound obvious. In practice, it is not always easy. When a piece of writing reflects something we already feel, it can seem more than persuasive. It can feel self-evident. We may think, “Yes, exactly. This explains everything.” We may want to share it immediately because it says what we have been trying to say ourselves.

That is often the moment when I now try to pause.

Not because I think every emotional article is dishonest. Not because I believe writers should sound neutral, cold, or detached. Not because I think large companies, technology platforms, governments, or media organisations should be protected from criticism.

I pause because I have learned that emotional recognition is not the same as evidence.

A good writer can describe a real problem and still make weak claims about its causes. A writer can use a genuine statistic in a misleading way. They can remember the past honestly, but still remember only one part of it. They can care deeply about a subject and still choose examples that support their argument while leaving out examples that would make the picture less clear.

They may do this on purpose. They may not. The content alone does not tell me what is in the author’s mind.

That distinction matters to me. I can say that an article is selective, unfair, poorly supported, or too certain. I can say that it may encourage readers to form a view too quickly. But I should be careful before saying that the author intended to manipulate, deceive, provoke anger, or sell a subscription. A single essay does not prove intention. It may show conviction, carelessness, frustration, limited research, commercial incentive, a strong personal worldview, or simply a writer trying to make their work memorable.

The effect of a piece of writing can be criticised without pretending that we know the motive behind it.

This is something I am still learning. It is easy to spot overconfidence in other people. It is harder to notice it in myself.

When emotion starts to feel like proof

The most effective arguments are often not made of lies. They are made of true fragments joined together too quickly.

A writer may say that modern life is full of advertising, subscriptions, data collection, and products designed to keep us engaged. That is not a strange observation. Many of us experience it every day.

They may then say that people used to have more free time, more community, and better ways to enjoy themselves. Perhaps they mention neighbours talking outside their homes, local music, board games, public libraries, parks, sport, shared meals, or children playing outside.

Again, none of this is impossible. Many people did have those experiences. Many people still do.

But an argument can move from observation to conclusion without showing the steps in between. It can quietly turn “some people had this experience” into “society was healthier”. It can turn “some technology is distracting” into “digital life is mainly shallow and harmful”. It can turn “companies profit from attention” into “all commercial culture is corrupt”. It can turn “the past had forms of community that we value” into “the past was freer, more social, and better”.

This is where I think we need to be careful.

A true fact is not always proof of the conclusion around it. A powerful memory is not the same as a historical account. A good anecdote is not the same as a trend. A statistic can be accurate and still be used outside its proper context.

I have started to think about this in terms of different kinds of claims.

Some claims are factual. They can be checked. If someone says that a study found a certain result, we can look for the study. If someone says that a law was passed on a certain date, we can verify it. If someone says that a number comes from a particular historical source, we can examine what that source actually measured.

Other claims are interpretations. If someone says that a society valued leisure more than we do, this may be based on facts, but it is still an interpretation. Another person may look at the same facts and see something different.

Then there are causal claims. These are often the hardest. If someone says that technology has made people less social, we need to ask which technology, which people, over what period, compared with what, and according to which measure of social life. A change in behaviour may have many causes. Housing costs, working patterns, childcare, transport, public services, wages, health, local spaces, family structures, and economic insecurity may all matter as much as the phone in someone’s hand.

Finally, there are value claims. When someone says that society should protect more time away from commercial pressure, that is a value judgement. I may agree with it. Someone else may agree with the facts but disagree about the solution. Facts matter in these discussions, but facts alone cannot decide what we should value.

I find this helpful because it stops me treating every sentence in an article as the same kind of statement.

The question is not simply, “Is this article true or false?”

A more useful question is, “Which parts are supported facts, which parts are interpretation, which parts are assumptions, and which parts are calls for action?”

This does not make reading less enjoyable. It makes it more honest.

The past is easy to romanticise

I have noticed that nostalgia can be one of the strongest tools in persuasive writing.

The past often arrives in a story as a place of depth and connection. People talked more. Children played outside. Families spent more time together. Leisure was simple. Communities were stronger. Entertainment was shared. Life was not yet captured by apps, subscriptions, notifications, and algorithms.

There may be truth in parts of that picture. But it is often incomplete.

The danger is that we compare the best memories of the past with the worst habits of the present.

We compare shared meals, music, libraries, friendships, local games, outdoor play, and family conversations with doomscrolling, advertising, loneliness, gambling-like product mechanics, online arguments, and endless short-form video.

That comparison is designed to produce a clear answer. But it is not a fair comparison.

The past also contained loneliness, exclusion, boredom, isolation, difficult work, inequality, domestic pressure, poor access to education, limited mobility, and few choices for many people. People read alone. They watched television alone. They gambled. They felt trapped by family, work, religion, class, disability, geography, or social expectation. Not every neighbourhood was welcoming. Not every family home was safe. Not every public space was open to everyone.

The present is also more mixed than its critics sometimes allow. Digital life can create loneliness, but it can also help people stay close to distant family and friends. It can give disabled people access to communities that are not available locally. It can support people who feel isolated in their town, workplace, school, or family. It can help people learn, create, organise, collaborate, find work, seek support, and take part in groups across borders.

I do not say this to defend every platform or every business model. I say it because I do not want nostalgia to do the work of evidence.

A writer may say that leisure used to be free and is now fully monetised. This sounds simple, but it is worth asking what “free” means.

A public library may be free at the point of use, but it is funded through public money. A piano inherited from a relative may cost the new owner nothing, but somebody paid for it. A park, a community hall, a sports field, a road, a home with space to gather, and enough free time to enjoy any of them all depend on resources, public choices, private money, unpaid labour, and social conditions.

The same is true of older forms of leisure. Books, records, musical instruments, cinema tickets, travel, sport, hobbies, and even time itself were not equally available to everyone.

This does not mean that subscriptions, data collection, and attention-based products are not a problem. It means that commercialisation and access are not simple opposites. A low-cost digital service may be more accessible to one person than an expensive physical product. A free public service may be available in one area and missing in another. A family may have had rich social life in the past while another family had very little choice or freedom.

The point is not to replace one perfect story with another. The point is to become suspicious of perfect stories.

I have also become cautious when historical numbers are used to create a quick moral lesson.

If someone says that medieval people had a very large number of holidays, I need to know what a holiday meant in that place and time. Was it a day free from work for a landlord? Was it a religious feast day? Did it include church duties? Did it include caring for animals, cooking, cleaning, childcare, repairs, gathering fuel, and other household work? Which people are being discussed? Which country? Which century? Which class?

The same applies to claims about hunter-gatherer societies, work, and leisure. The question is not only whether a number exists. It is what the number counted. Did it include food gathering only? Did it include food preparation, childcare, tool-making, travel, shelter, safety, and care for the group? Was it based on one community or many? Can a modern reader safely turn one anthropological estimate into a broad story about all of prehistory?

A striking statistic without a definition can become a rhetorical device. It may create the feeling of knowledge without giving us enough knowledge to judge the claim.

A fact-check is not a defence of the system

One reason people avoid fact-checking is that it can feel like taking the side of the status quo.

If someone is criticising a large company, an unfair system, poor working conditions, harmful product design, or the loss of local community, it can seem disloyal to question the evidence. It can look as though we are defending the very thing being criticised.

I think this is a mistake.

Questioning an argument is not the same as defending its target.

I can believe that attention-based business models deserve scrutiny while also asking whether a specific historical comparison is fair. I can be worried about the effects of digital products on children while asking for clear evidence rather than accepting every frightening claim. I can dislike intrusive advertising and still recognise that advertising is not a new invention. I can want stronger public spaces and community life without pretending that the past was equal, peaceful, or free from commercial influence.

In fact, I think good causes deserve better arguments.

When a writer uses weak evidence for a cause I care about, I should not give it a free pass just because I agree with the conclusion. If the evidence is poor, it makes the wider case easier to dismiss. It also makes it harder to understand what would genuinely help.

There is another problem when people are discouraged from asking questions. Some arguments make scepticism sound morally suspicious. If you ask for a source, you are told that you are missing the point. If you ask for context, you are called naïve. If you challenge a comparison, you are said to be defending powerful interests. If you do not join the anger, you are treated as part of the problem.

I do not think that is healthy.

Facts are not a distraction from the point. Facts are what stop the point becoming propaganda.

This does not mean that every article needs to be an academic paper. It does not mean that writers cannot use personal experience. Personal experience can be meaningful. It can show us what data alone might miss. It can make a problem visible.

But we should be clear about what personal experience can and cannot do.

A story about one person’s childhood can invite reflection. It cannot prove that all childhoods were better in the past.

A story about one person’s use of social media can show us a real concern. It cannot prove that all social media use is harmful.

A story about one workplace can reveal a management failure. It cannot prove that all companies work in the same way.

In leadership, technology, and business, I see this all the time. A single bad project becomes proof that remote work does not work. A successful use of AI becomes proof that every team must change immediately. A bad experience with a cloud provider becomes proof that cloud is a mistake. A story about a difficult manager becomes a general theory about an entire generation.

The story may be important. But it still needs context.

The larger the claim, the stronger and more direct the evidence should be.

That feels like a simple rule, but it is easy to forget when the story is well written and matches what we already believe.

The quiet pull of the crowd

When people talk about herd behaviour, they often imagine a crowd shouting in the street. But I think the modern version is usually quieter.

It can be a post being liked by thousands of people before most of them have opened a source. It can be a comment section where agreement becomes a sign of being morally awake. It can be a thread where people compete to show how strongly they feel. It can be an article that offers a clear villain, a neat explanation, and a sense that the reader has now seen through a hidden system.

The pressure is not always obvious. It may simply be the feeling that we should respond now.

• Share it.

• Comment.

• Subscribe.

• Cancel.

• Boycott.

• Condemn.

Declare that it “says everything”.

The speed is part of the problem. Fast judgement can feel like moral clarity.

There is evidence that moral and emotional language helps content spread online. One large study of more than 563,000 tweets on contentious political subjects found that moral-emotional words were associated with higher rates of sharing. Across the topics studied, each additional moral-emotional word was associated with about a 20% increase in retweeting. The researchers also found that this type of language tended to spread more strongly within ideological groups. This does not prove that every emotional article is designed to manipulate people. The study focused on political content on Twitter, so its findings should not be stretched too far. But it does show why language that combines moral judgement and emotion can travel so easily.

I do not think this makes readers weak or foolish. We all use shortcuts. We all trust people. We all have limited time. We cannot read every original study, check every historical source, or become an expert in every subject before forming a view.

The problem is not that other people follow a herd while we stand outside it.

The problem is that all of us can confuse a familiar feeling with proof.

I am more likely to trust an argument that confirms something I already worry about. I am more likely to notice bad reasoning in a writer I dislike than in a writer who shares my values. I am more likely to be patient with evidence that supports my view and impatient with evidence that complicates it.

This is uncomfortable to admit, but it is useful.

The first question I try to ask is not, “Is this writer wrong?”

It is, “Do I want this writer to be right?”

If the answer is yes, I have a reason to slow down.

Learning the discipline of the pause

I do not want to become cynical. I do not want to read everything as a trick, assume every writer is acting in bad faith, or behave as if emotion is always a weakness.

Emotion tells us that something matters. Anger can reveal injustice. Sadness can reveal loss. Fear can point to danger. Nostalgia can remind us of relationships, places, and values that we want to protect.

The problem begins when emotion takes the place of judgement.

I am trying to build a small habit before I share or strongly react to something that moves me. I call it the discipline of the pause.

The pause is not silence. It is not indecision. It is not refusing to take a position.

It is a short moment in which I ask what is happening inside me and what is happening in the argument.

What exactly is the author claiming? Is this a fact, an interpretation, a cause, a prediction, or a value judgement? What does the key statistic actually measure? What is the original source? Does the source say what the article says it says? What examples are missing? Is the past being remembered honestly, or romantically? Is the present being described fully, or only through its worst parts? What evidence would make me change my mind?

I also try to look away from the original page.

This is sometimes called lateral reading. Rather than studying only the article in front of us, we open other sources. We check who the writer is, what their background is, whether there is independent coverage of the claim, and whether the original research supports the conclusion being drawn. Research comparing professional fact-checkers, historians, and first-year university students found that professional fact-checkers used different strategies to assess online information, including looking beyond the page itself to investigate its source and context.

A simple framework called SIFT is useful here. The letters stand for Stop, Investigate the source, Find better coverage, and Trace claims back to their original context. It is not a perfect system and it does not turn anyone into an expert. But it gives me a way to interrupt the rush from emotion to certainty.

I also remind myself that fact-checking is not the same as winning.

Sometimes the honest conclusion will be that the writer’s central concern is reasonable, but their evidence is selective. Sometimes a statistic will be accurate, but the meaning drawn from it will be too broad. Sometimes a claim will be possible, but not proven. Sometimes I will find that my own first reaction was unfair.

That last part matters.

I do not want fact-checking to become a performance of superiority. I do not want it to become a way of saying, “I am smarter than the people who shared this.” I want it to be a way of saying, “I may be wrong too, and I do not want my emotions to decide before my judgement has had a chance.”

There is good reason to believe that corrections can help. In experiments across Argentina, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United Kingdom, researchers found that fact-checks reduced belief in false claims, with many effects still visible more than two weeks later. This does not mean corrections solve every problem or erase the effect of misleading content. But it does mean that checking and correcting claims is not pointless. It can improve accuracy.

For me, that is encouraging.

I do not expect a world without persuasion, emotion, bad arguments, clever headlines, commercial incentives, or people who are very certain of themselves. I do not expect to be free from bias either.

But I do think we can become harder to rush.

We can learn to say, “This may be partly true, but I need to know more.”

We can say, “I agree with the concern, but I am not convinced by this evidence.”

We can say, “This story moves me, but it does not settle the question.”

We can say, “I do not know what the author intended, but I can see how the structure of this argument may lead readers towards a quick conclusion.”

We can say, “I need to check whether I am sharing this because it is accurate, or because it makes me feel understood.”

The most influential misinformation is not always an obvious lie. Sometimes it is a real fact placed in the wrong frame. Sometimes it is a true concern inflated into a complete explanation. Sometimes it is a beautiful story that asks us to feel certainty before we have earned it.

That is why I am trying to practise the discipline of the pause.

Not because the crowd is always wrong.

Not because every writer is trying to control us.

Not because strong feelings should be ignored.

But because the crowd is never a substitute for thinking, and my first emotional response should not be the final authority on what I believe.

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About the Author
Diamantino Almeida is a tech leader, coach, and writer reshaping how we think about leadership in a burnout-driven world. With over 20 years at the intersection of engineering, DevOps, and team culture, he helps humans lead consciously from the inside out. When he’s not challenging outdated norms, he’s plotting how to make work more human, one verb at a time.