Category: Fact-Checking News
Fact-Checking News
Number of fact-checking outlets surges to 188 in more than 60 countries
Strong growth in Asia and Latin America helps fuel global increase.
By Mark Stencel - June 11, 2019
The number of fact-checking outlets around the world has grown to 188 in more than 60 countries amid global concerns about the spread of misinformation, according to the latest tally by the Duke Reporters’ Lab.
Since the last annual fact-checking census in February 2018, we’ve added 39 more outlets that actively assess claims from politicians and social media, a 26% increase. The new total is also more than four-times the 44 fact-checkers we counted when we launched our global database and map in 2014.
Globally, the largest growth came in Asia, which went from 22 to 35 outlets in the past year. Nine of the 27 fact-checking outlets that launched since the start of 2018 were in Asia, including six in India. Latin American fact-checking also saw a growth spurt in that same period, with two new outlets in Costa Rica, and others in Mexico, Panama and Venezuela.
The actual worldwide total is likely much higher than our current tally. That’s because more than a half-dozen of the fact-checkers we’ve added to the database since the start of 2018 began as election-related partnerships that involved the collaboration of multiple organizations. And some those election partners are discussing ways to continue or reactivate that work – either together or on their own.
Over the past 12 months, five separate multimedia partnerships enlisted more than 60 different fact-checking organizations and other news companies to help debunk claims and verify information for voters in Mexico, Brazil, Sweden, Nigeria and Philippines. And the Poynter Institute’s International Fact Checking Network assembled a separate team of 19 media outlets from 13 countries to consolidate and share their reporting during the run-up to last month’s elections for the European Parliament. Our database includes each of these partnerships, along with several others – but not each of the individual partners. And because they were intentionally short-run projects, three of these big partnerships appear among the 74 inactive projects we also document in our database.
Politics isn’t the only driver for fact-checkers. Many outlets in our database are concentrating efforts on viral hoaxes and other forms of online misinformation – often in coordination with the big digital platforms on which that misinformation spreads.
We also continue to see new topic-specific fact-checkers such as Metafact in Australia and Health Feedback in France — both of which launched in 2018 to focus on claims about health and medicine for a worldwide audience.
(Here’s how we decide which fact-checkers to include in the Reporters’ Lab database.)
Fact-Checkers by Continent Since Feb. 2018
Africa: 4 to 9
Asia: 22 to 35
Australia: 3 to 5
Europe: 52 to 61
North America: 53 to 60
South America: 15 to 18
TRACKING THE GROWTH
As we’ve noted, elections are not the only draw for aspiring fact-checkers. Many outlets in our database are concentrating their efforts on viral hoaxes and other forms of online misinformation – often in coordination with the big digital platforms on which that misinformation spreads. And those platforms are also providing incentives.
In one such effort, the Reporters’ Lab worked with Google and Schema.org to develop ClaimReview, an open-source tagging system for fact-checks. Google, Microsoft’s BING, Facebook and YouTube use this system to help identify and showcase fact-checkers’ work in their news feeds and search results – a process that generates traffic and attention for the fact-checkers. It also provides data that is powering experiments in live, real time fact-checks that can be delivered to users automatically. (Disclosure: Google and Facebook are among the funders of the Reporters’ Lab.)
Another driver: Facebook. It has recruited independent fact-checking partners around the world to help identify misinformation on its platforms. The social network began that effort in late 2016 with help from the Poynter’s Institute’s IFCN. (Poynter is a journalism training and research center in St. Petersburg, Florida, that also is home to the U.S. fact-checking site PolitiFact.)
Meanwhile, YouTube gave fact-checking a boost in India when it started putting fact-checks at the top of YouTube search results, which helped contribute to a surge of new outlets in that country. Now India has 11 entries in our database, six of which launched since our February 2018 census. And it’s likely there are others to add in the next few weeks.
KINDS OF FACT-CHECKERS
A bit more than half of fact-checkers are part of a media company (106 of 188, or 56%). That percentage has been dropping over the past few years, mostly because of the changing business landscape for media companies in the United States. In our 2018 census, 87% of the U.S. fact-checkers were connected to a media company (41 out of 47). Now it’s 65% (39 out of 60). In other words, as the number of fact-checker in the U.S. has grown, fewer of them have ties to those companies.
Among fact-checkers in the rest of the world, the media mix remains about half and half (67 out of 128, or 52% — very close to the 54% we saw in 2018).
The fact-checkers that are not part of a larger media organization include independent, standalone organizations, both for-profit and non-profit (the definitions of these legal and economic entities vary greatly from country to country). Some of these fact-checkers are subsidiary projects of bigger organizations that focus on civil society and political accountability. Others are affiliated with think tanks and academic institutions.
Among the recent additions is the journalism department at the University of the Philippines’ College of Mass Communication, which was the coordinator of Tsek.ph, a political fact-checking partnership mentioned earlier that also involves two other academic partners.
In the United States, we here at the Duke Reporters’ Lab joined forces last year with PolitiFact’s North Carolina partner, The News & Observer in Raleigh, to report and freely distribute fact-checks to other media across the state. Two of PolitiFact’s other recent local news partners are affiliated with academic institutions too: West Virginia University’s Reed College of Media and the University of Missouri’s journalism program. The Missouri School of Journalism also has a similar link to KOMU-TV, a local NBC affiliate in Columbia whose investigations unit did some fact-checking of its own during the 2018 midterm elections.
RATINGS
About 70% of the fact-checkers (131 of 188) have well-defined rating systems for categorizing the claims they investigate — similar to what we’ve seen in past years.
As usual, we found many of the rating systems to be entertaining. One of our new favorites comes from Spondeo Media in Mexico, which launched in December. It supplements a basic, four-point, true-to-false scale with a mascot – NETO, a cartoon lie-detector who smiles and jumps for joy with true claims but gets steamed with false ones. Another, India Today Fact Check, rated claims using a scale of one-to-three animated crows, along with a slogan in Hindi: “When you lie, the crow bites” (also the title of a popular movie: “Jhooth bole kauva kaate”).
We decided to time this year’s fact-checking census to correspond with the sixth annual GlobalFact Summit, which begins next week in Cape Town, South Africa. About 250 attendees from nearly nearly 60 countries are expected at this year’s gathering — which is yet another measure of fact-checking’s continued growth: That’s five times the number from the first GlobalFact in London in 2014.
Joel Luther, Share the Facts Research and Outreach Coordinator at the Duke Reporters’ Lab, and former student researcher Daniela Flamini (now an intern at the Poynter Institute’s International Fact Checking Network) contributed to this report.
FOOTNOTE: ANOTHER WAY TO COUNT FACT-CHECKERS?
A challenge we have each time the Duke Reporters’ Lab conducts our annual fact-checking censuses is that our final tally depends so much on when we happen to discover these outlets. Our counting also depends on when fact-checkers come and go — especially short-term, election-focused projects that last several months. If a fact-checker was hard at work most of the year covering a campaign, but then closed up shop before we did our census, they’ll still be counted — but in our list of inactive projects.
That inactive list is an interesting trove of good ideas for other fact-checkers to mine. It also provides an entirely different way for us to tally fact-checkers: by counting all the projects that were active at some point during the year — not just the ones that make it to winter.
This approach might better showcase the year in fact-checking. And it also would show that fact-checking was in fact growing faster than we even thought it was.
Here’s chart that compares the number of fact-checkers that we know were active in certain years — even the ones that ultimately closed down — with the subsequent census number for that year….
There are reasons why the Reporters’ Lab would still need to keep counting fact-checkers the way we have since 2014. For one, we need current lists and counts of serious fact-checking projects for all kinds of reasons, including academic research and the experiments that we and others want to try out with real-world fact-checkers.
And yet it’s still great to see how fast fact-checking is growing — even more than we sometimes thought.
(The small print for anyone who’s fact-checking me: The adjusted numbers shown here combine any fact-checker in our database that was active at some point during that given year. Most of our census reports were meant to count the previous year’s activity. For example our February 2018 census appears in this chart as our count of 2017 fact-checkers, even if some of those 2017 fact-checkers were only counted in last year’s census as inactive by the time the census was published. The number shown for 2018 is the 16-month 2018-19 number we are releasing in this report. You also might note that some other numbers here are slightly off from data we’ve previously shared. The main reason is that this proposed form of counting depends on having the dates that each project began and ended. In a handful of cases, we do not.)
A better ClaimReview to grow a global fact-check database
Google and the Reporters’ Lab have developed an easier method of labelling and logging fact-check articles.
By Sanha Lim - April 18, 2019
It’s now much easier for fact-checkers to use ClaimReview, a tagging tool that logs fact-checks published around the world into one database. The tool helps search engines — and readers — find non-partisan fact-checks published globally. It also organizes fact-check content into structured data that automated fact-checking will require.
Currently, only half of the roughly 160 fact-checking organizations that the Duke Reporters’ Lab tracks globally use ClaimReview. In response, Google and the Duke Reporters’ Lab have developed an easier method of labelling the articles to help both recruit more users and expand a vital fact-check data set.
ClaimReview was created in 2015 after a conversation between staff at Google and Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post fact-checker. Kessler wanted Google to highlight fact-checks in its search results. Bill Adair, director of the Duke Reporters’ Lab, was soon brought in to help.
Dan Brickley from Schema.org, Justin Kosslyn from Google and Adair developed a tagging system based on the schemas maintained by Schema.org, an organization that develops structured ways of organizing information. They created a universal system for fact-checkers to label their articles to include the claim checked, who said it and a ruling on its accuracy. “It’s the infrastructure that provides the atomic unit of fact-checking to search engines,” Adair said.
Initially, ClaimReview produced a piece of code that fact-checkers copy and pasted into their online content management system. Google and other search engines look for the code when crawling content. Next, Chris Guess of Adair’s team developed a ClaimReview widget called Share the Facts, a content box summarizing fact-checks that PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and the Washington Post can publish online and share on social media.
The latest version of ClaimReview no longer requires users to copy and paste the code, which can behave inconsistently on different content management systems. Instead, fact-checkers only have to fill out Google form fields similar to what they used previously to produce the code.
While the concept of ClaimReview is simple, it opens to the door to more innovation in fact-checking. It organizes data in ways that can be reused. By “structuring journalism, we can present content in more valuable ways to people,” said Adair.
By labeling fact-checks, the creators effectively created a searchable database of fact-checks, numbering about 24,000 today. The main products under development at the Reporters’ Lab, from FactStream to Squash, rely on fact-check databases. Automated fact-checking especially requires a robust database to quickly match untrue claims to previously published fact-checks.
The database ClaimReview builds offers even more possibilities. Adair hopes to tweak the fields fact-checkers fill in to provide better summaries of the fact-checks and provide more information to readers. In addition, Adair envisions ClaimReview being used to tag types of misinformation, as well as authors and publishers of false content. It could also tag websites that have a history of publishing false or misleading articles.
The tagging already is already benefiting some fact-check publishers. “ClaimReview helps to highlight and surface our fact-checks on Google, more than the best SEO skills or organic search would be able to achieve,” said Laura Kapelari, a journalist with Africa Check. ClaimReview has increased traffic on Africa Check’s website and helped the smaller Africa Check compete with larger media houses, she said. It also helps fact-checkers know which facts have already been investigated, which reduces redundant checks.
Joel Luther, the ClaimReview project manager in the Reporters’ Lab, expects this new ClaimReview format will save fact-checkers time and decrease errors when labeling fact-checks. However, there is still room to grow. Kapelari wishes there was a way for the tool to automatically grab key fields such as names in order to save time.
The Reporters’ Lab has a plan to promote ClaimReview globally. Adair is already busy on that front. Early this month, a group of international fact-checkers and technologists met in Durham for Tech & Check 2019, an annual conference where people on this quest share progress on automated fact-checking projects intended to fight misinformation. Adair, an organizer of Tech & Check, emphasized new developments with ClaimReview, as well as its promise for automating fact-checking.
Not much would be possible without this tool, he stressed. “It’s the secret sauce.”
During State of the Union, a failure…and a glimpse of Squash
Our app crashed under unusual traffic. But our tests of a new automated tool were a success.
By Bill Adair - February 6, 2019
We tested two fact-checking products during the State of the Union address. One failed, the other showed great promise.
The failure was FactStream, our iPhone app. It worked fine for the first 10 minutes of the speech. Users received two timely “quick takes” from Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler, but then the app crashed under an unusual surge of heavy traffic that we’re still investigating. We never recovered.
The other product is a previously secret project we’ve code-named Squash. It’s our first attempt at fully automated fact-checking. It converts speech to text and then searches our database of fact-checks from the Post, FactCheck.org and PolitiFact. When it finds a match, a summary of the fact-check pops onto the screen.
We’ve been testing Squash for the last few weeks with mixed results. Sometimes it finds exactly the right fact-checks. Other times the results are hilariously bad. But that’s what progress looks like.
We went into last night’s speech with very modest expectations. I said before the speech I’d be happy if the speech simply triggered fact-checks to pop up, even if it was a poor match.
But Squash actually performed pretty well. It had 20 pop-ups and six of them were in the ballpark.
Overall, the results were stunning. It gave us a glimpse of how good automated fact-checking can be.
We’ll have more to share once we’ve reviewed the results, so stay tuned.
As for FactStream, it now has lots of timely fact-checks from the State of the Union on the main home screen, which continues to function well. We will fix any problems we identify with the live event feature and plan to be back in action for real-time coverage for campaign events later this year.
Live fact-checking of the State of the Union address with our FactStream app
We're partnering with FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler to provide real-time checks.
By Bill Adair - February 3, 2019
UPDATE, Feb. 5, 11 p.m.: Our FactStream app failed during the State of the Union address. We apologize for the problems. We are still sorting out what happened, but it appears we got hit with an unexpected surge of traffic that overwhelmed our servers and our architecture.
As we noted at the bottom of this post, this was a test – only our second of the app. We’ll fix the problems and be better next time.
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The Reporters’ Lab is teaming up with the Washington Post, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org to offer live fact-checking of the State of the Union address on Tuesday night on our new FactStream app.
Journalists from the Post, PolitiFact, and FactCheck.org will provide real-time updates throughout the speech in two forms:
Ratings – Links to previously published fact-checks with ratings when the president repeats a claim that has been checked before.
Quick takes – Instant updates about a statement’s accuracy. They will be labeled red, yellow and green to indicate their truthfulness.
Tuesday’s speech will be the second test of FactStream. The first test, conducted during last year’s State of the Union address, provided users with 32 updates. We got valuable feedback and have made several improvements to the app.
FactStream is part of the Duke Tech & Check Cooperative, a project to automate fact-checking that is funded by Knight Foundation, the Facebook Journalism Project and the Craig Newmark Foundation. Additional support has been provided by Google.
FactStream is available for iPhone and iPad (sorry, no Android version yet!) and is a free download from the App Store.
The app has two streams. One, shown by the home symbol in the lower left of the screen, provides a constant stream of the latest fact-checks published every day throughout the year. The live event feature for the State of the Union address is marked by an icon of a calendar with a check mark.
Because this is a test, users could encounter a few glitches. We’d love to hear about any bugs you encounter and get your feedback at team@sharethefacts.org.
Reporters’ Lab students are fact-checking North Carolina politicians
Student journalists and computer scientists find claims and report articles for the N.C. Fact-Checking Project
By Catherine Clabby - November 20, 2018
Duke Reporters’ Lab students expanded vital political journalism during a historic midterm campaign season this fall with the North Carolina Fact-Checking Project.
Five student journalists reviewed thousands of statements that hundreds of North Carolina candidates vying for state and federal offices made online and during public appearances. They collected newsy and checkable claims from what amounted to a firehose of political claims presented as fact.
Duke computer science undergraduates with the Duke Tech & Check Cooperative applied custom-made bots and the ClaimBuster algorithm to scrape and sort checkable political claims from hundreds of political Twitter feeds.
Editors and reporters then selected claims the students had logged for most of the project’s 30 plus fact-checks and six summary articles that the News and Observer and PolitiFact North Carolina published between August and November.
Duke senior Bill McCarthy was part of the four-reporter team on the project, which the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund supported to expand local fact-checking during the 2018 midterms and beyond in a large, politically divided and politically active state.
“Publishing content in any which way is exciting when you know it has some value to voters, to democracy,” said McCarthy, who interned at PolitiFact in Washington, D.C. last summer. “It was especially exciting to get so many fact-checks published in so little time.”
Reporters found politicians and political groups often did not stick with the facts during a campaign election season that that fielded an unusually large number of candidates statewide and a surge in voter turnout.
“NC GOP falsely ties dozens of Democrats to single-payer health care plan,” read one project fact-check headline. “Democrat falsely links newly-appointed Republican to health care bill,” noted another. The fact-check “Ad misleads about NC governors opposing constitutional amendments” set the record straight about some Democratic-leaning claims about six proposed amendments to the state constitution.
Digging for the Truth
Work in the lab was painstaking. Five sophomores filled weekday shifts to scour hundreds of campaign websites, social media feeds, Facebook and Google political ads, televised debates, campaign mailers and whatever else they could put their eyes on. Often they recorded one politician’s attacks on an opponent that might, or might not, be true.
Students scanned political chatter from all over the state, tracking competitive state and congressional races most closely. The resulting journalism was news that people could use as they were assessing candidates for the General Assembly and U.S. Congress as well as six proposed amendments to the state constitution.
The Reporters’ Lab launched a mini news service to share each fact-checking article with hundreds of newsrooms across the state for free.
The Charlotte Observer, a McClatchy newspaper like the N&O, published several checks. So did smaller publications such as Asheville’s Citizen-Times and the Greensboro News and Record. Newsweek cited a fact-check report by the N&O’s Rashaan Ayesh and Andy Specht about a fake photo of Justice Kavanaugh’s accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, shared by the chairman of the Cabarrus County GOP, which WRAL referenced in a roundup.
Project fact-checks influenced political discourse directly too. Candidates referred to project fact-checks in campaign messaging on social media and even in campaign ads. Democrat Dan McCready, who lost a close race against Republican Mark Marris in District 9, used project fact-checks in two campaign ads promoted on Facebook and in multiple posts on his Facebook campaign page, for instance.
While N&O reporter Andy Specht was reporting a deceptive ad from the Stop Deceptive Amendments political committee, the group announced plans to change it.
The fact-checking project will restart in January, when North Carolina’s reconfigured General Assembly opens its first 2019 session.
Fact-checking course to be offered this spring
New class will be taught by Reporters' Lab co-directors Adair and Stencel
By Catherine Clabby - October 22, 2018
We rate this true: The DeWitt Wallace Center will offer a new course in the spring titled “Fact-Checking American Politics.”
The course, taught by Bill Adair and Mark Stencel, will examine the growth of political fact-checking by organizations such as the Washington Post, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org, along with dozens more across the United States and around the world. Students will learn advanced techniques for researching political claims by candidates and elected officials and will write fact-check articles.
Adair, the Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy, is the founder of PolitiFact and the International Fact-Checking Network. He worked 24 years for the St. Petersburg Times (now Tampa Bay Times) and covered the White House, Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court. Adair and the PolitiFact team won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2009.
Mark Stencel is co-director of the Reporters’ Lab at Duke, where he tracks the spread and impact of fact-checking and teaches courses in political journalism. His introduction to fact-checking was working as a political researcher at The Washington Post during the 1992 presidential campaign. He has been a senior editor and media executive at The Post, Congressional Quarterly (now CQ-Roll Call) and National Public Radio.
The course will focus on independent analysis and advanced research techniques, including the importance of obtaining original documents and relying on multiple sources. Students will learn how to analyze claims and determine ratings. They also will learn how to identify, track and rate campaign promises.
Adair and Stencel will emphasize clear, well-argued, persuasive writing and well-supported fact-check ratings. They also will examine the impact of fact-checking on politicians and political discourse.
The course is listed PJMS 390S – Special Topics in Journalism. It is cross-listed as PUBPOL 290S.
Reporters’ Lab to launch project to promote ClaimReview
Google-funded project will seek to expand number of fact-checkers using tagging system
By Erica Ryan - October 2, 2018
The Duke Reporters’ Lab is launching a global effort to get more publishers to adopt ClaimReview, a schema.org open standard tagging system or “markup” that search engines and other major digital platforms use to find and highlight fact-checking articles.
The ClaimReview project, funded by a $200,000 grant from the Google News Initiative, will include a partnership with the International Fact-Checking Network, the global alliance of fact-checking organizations based at the Poynter Institute.
The Reporters’ Lab will develop instructional materials about ClaimReview and assist publishers in adopting a new tool to create the markup more easily with help from Google and Data Commons. The Lab also will work to expand the number of publishers around the world that are using ClaimReview. The IFCN will produce webinars and conduct outreach and training sessions at fact-checking conferences around the world, including the group’s annual Global Fact conference.
ClaimReview was developed three years ago through a partnership of the Reporters’ Lab, Google, and schema.org. It provides a standard way for publishers of fact-checks to identify the claim being checked, the person or entity that made the claim, and the conclusion of the article. The standardization enables search engines and other platforms to highlight the fact-checks in search results.
Google and Bing, the Microsoft search engine, both use ClaimReview to highlight fact-checking articles in search results and their own news products. Facebook announced in the summer that it plans to use ClaimReview as part of its partnership with fact-checkers.
The Reporters’ Lab uses ClaimReview as a key element in the Tech & Check Cooperative, our ambitious effort to automate fact-checking. Projects such as the FactStream app for iPhone and iPad and a new app being developed for television rely on the markup.
“ClaimReview is one of the untold success stories of the fact-checking movement,” said Bill Adair, director of the Reporters’ Lab. “It’s helping people find the facts in search results and helping fact-checkers increase their audience and impact.”
Despite the success, the Reporters’ Lab team estimates that roughly half the fact-checkers in the world still are not using the tagging system. Some fact-checkers have found it cumbersome to create the ClaimReview markup in their own publishing systems, while others have been confused about the different options for making it.
The new project will help editors switch to the new Google / Data Commons markup tool, a simpler way of generating ClaimReview, and provide technical assistance when they need it.
“We think of this project as ClaimReview 2.0,” Adair said. “This should expand the number of publishers using it, which should broaden the audience for fact-checking around the world.”
Spreading the word on The NC Fact-Checking Project
Journalists from the Reporters' Lab and the News & Observer appeared on Spectrum News
By Catherine Clabby - August 16, 2018
Cathy Clabby of The Reporters’ Lab and Andy Specht of The News & Observer appeared on Spectrum Cable’s “Politics Tonight” this week to explain the newly announced NC Fact-Checking Project. The journalists briefed Spectrum News host Tim 
Boyum on the ambitious plan to fact-check claims by politicians statewide during federal and state campaigns this fall and into the 2019 General Assembly session.
In the project, Duke journalism students and faculty – assisted by Tech & Check bots – will scour campaign messaging and news reports to find newsworthy claims by politicians that can be verified. Journalists at The News & Observer will select statements to check, report their veracity and craft the fact-checks. The reporting will be shared for free with print, broadcast and digital newsrooms statewide. To watch, click here.
The number of fact-checkers around the world: 156… and growing
Collaboration, aggregation and networks add to the Reporters' Lab ongoing survey of fact-checking projects in more than 50 countries.
By Mark Stencel - August 7, 2018
The number of active fact-checking projects around the world now stands at 156, with steady growth driven by expanding networks and new media partnerships that focus on holding public figures and organizations accountable for what they say.
And elections this year in the United States and around the globe mean that number will likely increase even more by the time the Duke Reporters’ Lab publishes its annual census early next year. Our map of the fact-checkers now shows them in 55 countries.
There were 149 active fact-checking ventures in the annual summary we published in February, up from 44 when we started this count in 2014. And after this summer’s Global Fact summit in Rome — where the attendee list topped 200 and the waitlist was more than three times as long — we still have plenty of other possible additions to vet and review in the coming weeks. So check back for updates.
Among the most recent additions is Faktiskt, a Swedish media partnership that aggregates reporting from five news organizations — two newspapers, two public broadcasters and a digital news service. We’ve seen other aggregation partnerships like this elsewhere, such as Faktenfinder in Germany and SNU FactCheck in South Korea. (This is a different model from the similarly named Faktisk partnership in Norway, where six news organizations operate a jointly funded fact-checking team whose work is made freely available as a public service to other media in the country.)
As we prepare for our annual fact-checking census, we plan to look more closely at the output of each contributor to these aggregation networks to see which of them we should also count as standalone fact-checkers. Our goal is to represent the full range of independent and journalistic fact-checking, including clusters of projects in particular countries and local regions, as well as ventures that find ways to operate across borders.
Along those lines, we also added checkmarks to our map for Africa Check‘s offices in Kenya and Nigeria. We had done the same previously for the South Africa-based project’s office in Senegal, which covers francophone countries in West Africa. The new additions have been around awhile too: The Kenya office has been in business since late 2016 and the Nigeria office opened two months later.
Meanwhile, our friends at Africa Check regularly help us identify other standalone fact-checking projects, including two more new additions to our database: Dubawa in Nigeria and ZimFact in Zimbabwe. The fast growth of fact-checking across Africa is one reason the International Fact-Checking Network’s sixth Global Fact summit will be in Cape Town next summer.
One legacy of these yearly summits is IFCN’s code of principles, and the code has established an independent evaluation process to certify that each of its signatories adheres to those ethical and journalistic standards. Our database includes all 58 signatories, including the U.S.-based (but Belgium-born) hoax-busting site Lead Stories; Maldita’s “Maldito Bulo” (or “Damned Hoax”) in Spain; and the “cek facta” section of the Indonesian digital news portal Liputan6. All three are among our latest additions.
There’s more to come from us. We plan to issue monthly updates as we try to keep our heads and arms around this fast-growing journalism movement. I’ll be relying heavily on Reporters’ Lab student researcher Daniela Flamini, who has just returned from a summer fact-checking internship at Chequeado in Argentina. Daniela takes over from recently graduated researcher Riley Griffin, who helped maintain our database for the past year.
Take a look at the criteria we use to select the fact-checkers we include in this database and let us know if you have any additions to suggest.
Reporters’ Lab joins N&O, UNC Reese News Lab on major fact-checking project
With grant from the N.C. Local News Lab Fund, partnership will expand non-partisan fact-checking throughout the state
By Catherine Clabby - August 1, 2018
The Duke Reporters’ Lab is joining McClatchy Carolinas and the UNC Reese News Lab in an ambitious project to expand non-partisan fact-checking throughout North Carolina.
With a $50,000 grant from the North Carolina Local News Lab Fund, the North Carolina Fact-Checking Project will build on the existing work at The News & Observer, add the work of student journalists and take advantage of new automated tools from the Duke Tech & Check Cooperative.
The project will evaluate statements by state and federal candidates in the 2018 election as well as lawmakers in the General Assembly session that begins in January 2019. The fact-checks will be produced by N&O journalists as part of PolitiFact North Carolina and will be made available for free to any news organization in the state for use online and in print.
The project will get support from the new TruthBuzz program of the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ), which is hiring an engagement fellow based on Raleigh to promote the North Carolina fact-checking.
The North Carolina Fact-Checking Project will put special emphasis on claims by politicians in rural parts of the state. Students in the Reporters’ Lab will scour news coverage and campaign ads for factual claims made by state, local and congressional candidates. The Lab will build new versions of its Tech & Check Alerts that use automated bots to find statements by politicians in social media that could be of interest to the North Carolina fact-checkers.
The Duke students and bots will provide daily suggestions of possible claims to The News & Observer, which will select which statements to research.
The UNC Reese News Lab will co-host a student seminar on fact-checking and help select a student journalist to work on the project. Representatives from Duke, TruthBuzz and the News & Observer will hold outreach sessions around the state to promote fact-checking and encourage news organizations to publish the project’s work.
About the partners:
The North Carolina Local News Lab Fund is a collaborative fund at the North Carolina Community Foundation established by a group of local and national funders who believe in the power of local journalism, local stories, and local people to strengthen our democracy.
The Duke Reporters’ Lab at the Sanford School of Public Policy is a center of research on fact-checking and automated journalism. The Lab tracks the growth of fact-checking around the world, conducts studies on important topics and develops tools to help journalists.
McClatchy Carolinas is the McClatchy division that publishes three newspapers in North Carolina, The News & Observer, The Charlotte Observer and The Herald-Sun. The N&O has a strong team of political reporters and has been the state’s PolitiFact partner for the last two years.
The Reese News Lab is an experimental media and research project based at the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.