How NFL’s New 8k “Hawk Eye” Cameras Offer an Interesting Model for Truth and Verification

Rather than relying on chains and the human eye to measure whether teams have achieved a first down in NFL football games next season, the league is turning to Sony 8k cameras with a new technology known as “hawk eye” to precisely and instantly measure whether a first down was achieved. The idea is to verify the exact line and distance required by high-definition cameras to remove the possibility of human error and make the game faster.

Yesterday was also International Fact- Checking day, a holiday described as “a day to celebrate the importance of facts and the news organizations that promote them through rigorous and nonpartisan accountability journalism.” Why am I linking these two stories together?

The idea of the hawk eye camera is based on the insight that the best time to verify something as specific as the exact positioning of the ball is at the moment when a play has been completed. This is real time fact-checking in a sense—a truth being measured and quantified in real time. What if we could do this with media stories and specifically political facts? Imagine taking the content of speeches or interviews actually given by politicians and quantifying the things they have said publicly as fact. Then comparing what they say in real time against those factually verified past remarks. This could combat one issue modern journalists face: people lying about what they have said or pretending like they never said it. Just like teams or referees cannot manipulate the positioning of the ball in an NFL game, politicians could be held more accountable for what they have said in the past or lying about what others may have said or not said as well.

This may be an idealistic idea, but it does seem that if we can verify truth for something like the position of a ball with technology, perhaps we could do the same for other things as well.