Truth and the Commonwealth: what a morning with Sir David Spiegelhalter taught me about misinformation

On Sunday the BBC World Service broadcast The Documentary: Truth and the Commonwealth, recorded in the days before the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting opened in London. Sir David Spiegelhalter, Cambridge's Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk, brought together six young people drawn from the Commonwealth's affiliated youth organisations, and I was one of them. For nearly half an hour we talked about how false information moves through our home countries, and what, if anything, can be done about it.

Sir David's method is disarming. He does not lecture. He asks you to interrogate a claim: where did the number come from, who produced it, what would it look like if the opposite were true. It is the statistician's instinct, and it is, I realised as we spoke, also the journalist's. Every newsroom worth the name runs on a version of the same discipline: a claim is not a fact until it has been checked against something independent of the person making it.

What stayed with me afterwards was how poorly matched the problem and the response are. Misinformation travels on networks built for speed and reward, stripped of context and provenance. Verification is slow, unfashionable and unpaid. The platforms profit from the first and have no stake in the second. In smaller societies, where a rumour can circle a close-knit community before breakfast, the stakes are sharper still. A false claim about a person, a ministry or an election does not have to convince everyone. It has to reach enough people before the correction catches up.

The participants around that table came from Botswana, Samoa, Malaysia, Canada and South Africa, and the stories were recognisably the same: health scares that outrun the clinics, political claims no one can trace, official figures quoted without the uncertainty attached to them. Sir David has spent his career arguing that evidence should be accessible, useable and assessable, and that last word is the important one. The public does not need to be told whom to trust. It needs the means to test what it is told, and it is our job, as journalists and as institutions, to hand over the workings.

I left the studio convinced of three things. First, the answer to bad information is not less speech but better verification, taught early and practised constantly. Second, those of us who report in small states carry an extra burden: our errors travel faster and our corrections travel slower, so the checking has to happen before publication, not after. Third, truth is a form of public infrastructure, like courts or clean water. It is built by unglamorous, repetitive work, and it fails the moment the people responsible for it start treating shortcuts as acceptable.

The Commonwealth heads of government met in London this week under the theme of a common future. If there is one thread connecting a statistician at Cambridge, six young delegates, and every newsroom from Port of Spain to Apia, it is this: a common future rests on a common understanding of what is true. That is not a sentiment. It is a workload, and it belongs to all of us.