You Are Here: Home » Google

Tag: Google

We want your feedback on the MediaReview tagging system

Published June 9, 2020 by Bill Adair

Last fall, we launched an ambitious effort to develop a new tagging system for fact-checks of fake videos and images. The idea was to take the same approach that fact-checkers use when they check claims by politicians and political groups, a system called ClaimReview, and build something of a sequel. We called it MediaReview.

For the past nine months, Joel Luther, Erica Ryan and I have been talking with fact-checkers, representatives of the tech companies and other leaders in the battle against misinformation. Our ever-expanding group has come up with a great proposal and would love your feedback.

Like ClaimReview, MediaReview is schema – a tagging system that web publishers can use to identify different kinds of content. By tagging their articles, the publishers are essentially telling the world, “This is a fact-check on this politician on this particular claim.” That can be a valuable signal to tech companies, which can decide if they want to add labels to the original content or demote its standing in a feed, or do nothing. It’s up to them.

(Note: Google and Facebook have supported the work of The Reporters’ Lab and have given us grants to develop MediaReview.)

ClaimReview, which we developed with Google and Schema.org five years ago, has been a great success. It is used by more than half of the world’s fact-checkers and has been used to tag more than 50,000 articles. Those articles get highlighted in Google News and in search results on Google and YouTube.

We’re hopeful that MediaReview will be equally successful. By responding quickly to fake videos and bogus images, fact-checkers can provide the tech platforms with vital information about false content that might be going viral. The platforms can then decide if they want to take action.

The details are critical. We’ve based MediaReview on a taxonomy developed by the Washington Post. We’re still discussing the names of the labels, so feel free to make suggestions about the labels – or anything.

You can get a deeper understanding of MediaReview in this article in NiemanLab.

You can see screenshots of our current MediaReview form, including working labels and definitions here: Claim Only, Video, Image.

You can see our distillation of the current issues and add your comments here.

Comments closed

Reporters’ Lab to launch project to promote ClaimReview

Reporters’ Lab to launch project to promote ClaimReview

Published October 2, 2018 by Erica Ryan

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.”

Comments closed

Fact-checking moves into the Google Home

Published July 8, 2017 by Erica Ryan

A new Reporters’ Lab app allows users to “talk to Share the Facts.”

The new app for the Google Home taps the growing database of articles from the world’s fact-checkers to provide answers to voice queries. It is part of our Share the Facts project, which is expanding the reach of fact-checking around the world.

The Google Home app features fact-checks of claims by politicians and other public figures from Share the Facts partner organizations, including PolitiFact, The Washington Post’s Fact Checker and FactCheck.org.

The Share the Facts app, which is similar to one unveiled last fall for the Amazon Echo, uses natural speech recognition to analyze and answer questions from our database of roughly 9,000 fact-checks.

To activate it on your Google Home, say: “OK, Google, talk to Share the Facts.” Then ask questions such as:

“Did Donald Trump oppose the war in Iraq?”
“Was Obamacare a failure?”
“Is it true that Donald Trump said climate change was a hoax?”

Try to use the most important keywords in your question, following the examples above.

We welcome feedback on the Share the Facts app for the Google Home by emailing project manager Erica Ryan.

The app was unveiled at Global Fact 4 in Madrid, Spain, the annual meeting of the International Fact-Checking Network.

We also announced that the Share the Facts widget, which has been available in English, French, Polish and Italian, now has versions in German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Indonesian, Hindi and Japanese. The project is a partnership with the Google News Lab and Jigsaw, a technology incubator within Alphabet.

The widget allows fact-checkers to get a “Fact Check” tag for their content in Google News and search results. Google uses the “Fact Check” label, launched in 2016, to find and distribute accurate content and to increase the visibility of quality journalism.

The widget also offers other benefits for fact-checkers. Each widget is a concise summary of a fact-check that can be shared on Facebook and Twitter. Participating fact-checkers can also be featured in new products like the Share the Facts apps for the Google Home and the Amazon Echo.

Three partners are testing the widget in the newly available languages: Aos Fatos of Brazil, Wiener Zeitung of Austria and El Confidencial of Spain. We hope to expand the widget soon to publishers in Indonesia, Japan and India.

Organizations interested in using the Share the Facts widget can find more information on the Share the Facts website or by emailing team@sharethefacts.org.

Comments closed

At Tech & Check, some new ideas to automate fact-checking

At Tech & Check, some new ideas to automate fact-checking

Published April 4, 2016 by Bill Adair

Last week, journalists and technologists gathered at Duke to dream up new ways that automation could help fact-checking.

The first Tech & Check conference, sponsored by the Duke Reporters’ Lab and Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network, brought together about 50 journalists, students and computer scientists. The goal was to showcase existing projects and inspire new ones.

Tech and Check photo — At Tech & Check, groups of students, journalists and technologists dreamed up new ideas to automate fact-checking.

The participants included representatives of Google, IBM, NBC News, PolitiFact, Full Fact, FactCheck.org and the WRAL-TV. From the academic side, we had faculty and Ph.D students from Duke, the University of North Carolina, University of Texas-Arlington, Indiana University and the University of Michigan.

The first day featured presentations about existing projects that automate some aspect of fact-checking; the second day, attendees formed groups to conceive new projects.

The presentations showcased a wide variety of tools and research projects. Will Moy of the British site Full Fact did a demo of his claim monitoring tool that tracks the frequency of talking points, showing how often politicians said the phrase over time. Naeemul Hassan of the University of Texas at Arlington showed ClaimBuster, a project I’ve worked on, that can ingest huge amounts of text and identify factual claims that journalists might want to check.

IBM’s Ben Fletcher showed one of the company’s new projects known as Watson Angles, a tool that extracts information from Web articles and distills it into a summary that includes key players and a timeline of events. Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, a researcher at Indiana University, showed a project that uses Wikipedia to fact-check claims.

On the second day, we focused on the future. The attendees broke into groups to come up with new ideas for research. The groups had 75 minutes to create three ideas for tools or further research. The projects showed the many ways that automation can help fact-checking.

One promising idea was dubbed “Parrot Score,” a website that could build on the approach that Full Fact is exploring for claim monitoring. It would track the frequency of claims and then calculate a score for politicians who use canned phrases more often. Tyler Dukes, a data journalist from WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C., said Parrot Score could be a browser extension that showed the origin of a claim and then tracked it through the political ecosystem.

Despite the focus on the digital future of journalism, we used Sharpies and a lot of Post-It notes.

Two teams proposed variations of a “Check This First” button that would allow people to verify the accuracy of a URL before they post it on Facebook or in a chat. One team dubbed it “ChatBot.” Clicking it would bring up information that would help users determine if the article was reliable.

Another team was assigned to focus on ways to improve public trust in fact-checkers. The team came up with several interesting ideas, including more transparency about the collective ratings for individual writers and editors as well as a game app that would simulate the process that journalists use to fact-check a claim. The app could improve trust by giving people an opportunity to form their own conclusions as well as demonstrating the difficult work that fact-checkers do.

Another team, which was focused on fact-checker tools, came up with some interesting ideas for tools. One would automatically detect when the journalists were examining a claim they had checked before. Another tool would be something of a “sentence finisher” that, when a journalist began typing something such as “The unemployment rate last month…” would finish the sentence with the correct number.

The conference left me quite optimistic about the potential for more collaboration between computer scientists and fact-checkers. Things that never seemed possible, such as checking claims against the massive Wikipedia database, are increasingly doable. And many technologists are interested in doing research and creating products to help fact-checking.

Comments closed

No cold pizza: Notes from a structured journalism planning session

A professorial Android greeted us at Google’s Cambridge office.

No cold pizza: Notes from a structured journalism planning session

Published February 23, 2015 by Bill Adair

We held Friday’s meeting in a windowless conference room because that’s where we go when we discuss structured journalism. This year, our meeting was at Google’s office in Cambridge, Mass., and our host David Smydra upheld the tradition.

It’s not that we fear sunlight. It’s just a quirk of scheduling. You may recall that last year’s meeting, our first, was in a windowless room at Reuters where we munched on cold pizza. This year, we got to enjoy Google’s amazing lunch buffet.

Around the table: David, Reg Chua of Reuters, Laura and Chris Amico, the creators of Homicide Watch, and me.

The goal for our second annual structured journalism strategy session was to assess how we did in our first year and set goals for the next 12 months.

We discussed our successes. We held well-attended panels at the International Journalism Festival in Italy and the Online News Association meeting in Chicago and we started this mailing list. We also wrote blog posts and articles, although we each felt we could have done more.

We discussed our new structured projects: Laura did a demo of a cool one she’s leading at the Boston Globe, which should be published in the next couple of weeks; Chris did a demo of two structured sites he’s built for Frontline, Ballot Watch, which follows the changes in state voting laws, and Ebola Outbreak: How the Virus Spread.

I showed two mock-ups of websites I’m building with Duke students, one to track and rate medical studies (a project now on hold because we concluded it’s too complex a subject) and one that follows cases of athletes charged with crimes. We’re calling it Rule 46, after the NHL rule on fighting.

David did demos of some Google products that can help structured journalism: Google Consumer Surveys, which can generate revenue, and Google Newsstand, which publishes free and premium articles from various sources and can display structured content in an attractive and readable form.

Reg Chua, David Smydra, Bill Adair, Laura Amico and Chris Amico.

A common theme in our discussions: the need for narrative and context in structured journalism. Questions and suggestions from the group made me realize that our sports crime project needed an additional feature — articles — to help readers better understand the structured content. Readers are interested in stories, David said, and we shouldn’t “outsource how the narrative gets built” to the user.

We discussed business goals and agreed that the long-tail potential and new, innovative content formats of structured journalism projects provide different kinds of opportunities to earn revenue. It’s important for both editorial and business-side leaders to plan for revenue opportunities from the start.

We agreed to keep speaking and writing about structured journalism. We’re holding a panel titled Why Structure is the Future of Journalism at the International Journalism Festival in April and we hope to hold another one at ONA15 in Los Angeles. We’ve also started collecting a list of structured journalism projects that I’ll be publishing on the website of the Duke Reporters’ Lab. And we’d like to get this listserv more involved in developing the ideas of structured journalism and spreading the word — perhaps a larger group meeting later this year would be useful, too. (Let us know if you would be interested in that!)

We’ll be holding another planning session next year, probably at Duke. I’ll find us a windowless room.

Comments closed