Fact-Checking Politicians

We study the reaction of national politicians to rigorous fact-checking of their public statements. Our research design relies on a novel randomized field experiment conducted in collaboration with a leading fact-checking company. Our results show that fact-checking discourages politicians from making factually incorrect statements, with effects lasting several weeks. At the same time, we document that fact-checking neither increases nor displaces correct statements. Instead, fact-checked politicians tend to substitute incorrect statements with either no statements or with unverifiable ones. This suggests that they also respond by increasing the “ambiguity” of their language to escape the possibility of public scrutiny.