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Tag: Rouhani Meter

Fact-checking booms as numbers grow by 20 percent

The 200-person attendee list for next week’s Global Fact 4 summit in Madrid is up 80 from last year’s meeting in Buenos Aires, and more than twice what it was in London two years ago. And with good reason: The number of fact-checkers has been growing too, driven by concerns about a global epidemic of misinformation, viral hoaxes and official lying.

The Duke Reporters’ Lab database of international fact-checking initiatives now counts 126 active projects in 49 countries. That’s up 20 percent from the 105 projects we tallied a year ago. And that year-over-year increase continues the growth we found in for our most recent annual fact-checking census in February.

Active Fact-Checkers by Continent
Africa: 4
Asia: 14
Australia: 2
Europe: 46
North America: 47
South America: 13

NOTE: All the numbers presented throughout this article are as of June 30, 2017. An updated map, global tally and country-by-country lists are available on the Reporters’ Lab fact-checking page.

It’s great to see so many new sites: 17 of the 126 fact-checkers opened for business in the past 12 months. One of the newest, the Ferret Fact Service in Edinburgh, launched just nine weeks ago. And there was the welcome return of Australia’s ABC. Government funding cuts ended that project last year, but it returned from an 11-month hiatus on June 5 as a jointly branded partnership of the public broadcasting company and RMIT University in Melbourne. And the same Toronto-based team of technology activists that built a site four years ago to track Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s campaign promises launched a new fact-checking service in April: Fact-Nameh (“The Book of Facts”), the PolitiFact of Iran.

Of the fact-checkers that launched in the past year, seven were in Europe, four were in North America, three were in Asia and three were in South America. And all appeared in countries with roiling political situations plagued by false claims and misinformation that made global headlines — from presidential impeachments (Brazil and South Korea) to an attempted coup (Turkey) to intense immigration fights (everywhere!) to nationwide campaigns and voting (South Korea and Turkey again, plus Austria, Iran, Italy, Kosovo, the U.K and, um, the U.S. — with Germany’s turn coming in September).

If ever there was a time for fact-checking, this was it.

The United States is home to a third (42) of the fact-checkers we track. We also found that 16 other countries have at least two fact-checking projects, and seven of those have three or more, including Brazil (8), the United Kingdom (6), France (5), South Korea (5), Ukraine (4) and Canada (3).

We saw an encouraging sign about quality: One-fifth of the fact-checkers in the database (25 of the 126) are already verified signatories of International Fact-Checking Network’s newly established Code of Principles. And that number will grow because independent evaluators are reviewing additional applications. The code was written by an IFCN committee last summer to encourage best practices such as fairness, a commitment to correcting errors, and transparency on sources, methodology and funding. Facebook is using IFCN’s Code to identify trustworthy non-partisan fact-checking partners to help flag fake news and other misinformation.

Most of the sites, about six out of 10, are affiliated with established news media organizations. The rest are a mix of independent journalism and research projects, many of which are affiliated with universities, think tanks and non-governmental groups instead of existing media companies.

The ties to media companies are especially common in the United States, where 83 percent of fact-checkers (35 of 42) are operated by or closely affiliated with bigger news organizations. In the rest of the world, a bit over half (44 of 84, or 52 percent) have direct news media ties. But that mix may be shifting. In our 2016 census, less than half of the fact-checkers outside the U.S. were part of a larger media house (24 of 55, or 44 percent).

If you’re keeping track of all these numbers, you better write them down in pencil and be ready for updates. We still have a pending list of other fact-checkers we need to evaluate, including some whose staff we look forward to meeting at the Madrid summit. (Here’s an explanation of how the Reporters’ Lab identifies the fact-checkers we include in our database. In addition to journalism that fairly examines the accuracy of statements by public figures and institutions, we also look for authoritative, nonpartisan reporting on the progress of political promises and the credibility of widely shared online sources of information and misinformation.)

The healthy growth we’ve measured since last year’s Global Fact conference comes even after we had to move more than a dozen other fact-checkers to inactive status. In fact, at this point we have a list of more than five dozen inactive fact-checking initiatives.

That kind of fluctuation and turnover is consistent with the natural attrition we’ve tracked over the past several years — with many fact-checkers springing up for campaigns and then going dark. Some election-oriented fact-checkers will reliably return for the next campaign. That requires us to continuously determine which projects are hibernating comfortably and which have met their ultimate fact-checking fate. But since we can now base those choices on several years of observation, we now leave these seasonal fact-checkers marked as “active” in our database, noting their campaign focus in our descriptions. And we are continuously finding established fact-checkers who previously escaped our notice, which also adds to the growing tally. If you’re one of them, please let us know.

The Reporters’ Lab is a project of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy at Duke University’s Sanford School for Public Policy. We started the fact-checking database three years ago to track the reach and impact of this journalism. It also supports the Lab’s efforts to develop tools and services that help fact-checkers report and disseminate their work to a bigger audience. That includes Share the Facts, a project that helps fact-checkers distribute their reporting on other websites and platforms, including devices such as the Amazon Echo. Google also has used the Lab’s fact-checking database in its recent efforts to elevate fact-checks in search results and on the redesigned Google News page.

This update is based on research compiled over several months in part by Reporters’ Lab student researcher Hank Tucker. Alexios Mantzarlis of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network also contributed, as did Reporters’ Lab director Bill Adair, Knight Professor for the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University (and founder of PolitiFact). Thanks also to Cristina Tardáguila of Agência Lupa in Brazil, Itziar Bernaola of El Objetivo in Spain, Boyoung Lim of Newstapa in South Korea, and many other fact-checkers around the world who help us keep up with this fast-growing form of journalism.

Please send updates and additions to Reporters’ Lab co-director Mark Stencel (mark.stencel@duke.edu).

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Report from Perugia: Fact-checkers discuss sustainability, July meeting, olive oil

We had a great turnout for last week’s regional meeting of fact-checkers in Perugia, Italy.

The 15 attendees came from fact-checking sites in Bosnia, the Czech Republic, Iran, Africa, Nepal, Italy and the United States. Several came long distances: Damakant Jayshi, who is starting a new site in Nepal, traveled about 4,000 miles; Farhad Souzanchi, who operates the Iranian Rouhani Meter from Toronto, Canada, came 4,300 miles.

Fact-checkers in Perugia.
Fact-checkers in Perugia.

Alexios Mantzarlis, his team from Pagella Politica, and RAI TV producer Alberto Puoti were our Italian hosts. They translated menus, recommended the local specialties (wild boar!) and helped us appreciate good olive oil.

One discovery: It turns out there is good wine in Italy, so we tried some.

We organized the meeting to coincide with the International Journalism Festival, a wonderful conference held every year in the old hilltop city. (Actually, calling an Italian city “old” is probably redundant!)

At the journalism festival, Alexios, Peter Cunliffe-Jones and I were on a panel that showed how fact-checking can be done by any beat reporter. Margo Gontar of Stop Fake in Ukraine was on a panel about debunking false information.

We all got together Saturday morning in a hotel conference room and discussed the challenge of sustainability and how we can find new sources of revenue. We also talked about our two successful global checkathons and the pros and cons of fact-checking the media.

We met Saturday morning in a hotel conference room and discussed the challenge of sustainability and other topics.
We met Saturday morning in a hotel conference room and discussed the challenge of sustainability and other topics.

We discussed possible topics for our London summit in late July, including how to adapt fact-checks to different platforms, how to make our work more lively and how to measure our impact.

Another topic: the need to collect examples of how our fact-checking is having an impact. I’m going to create a simple Google form that you can use to submit anecodtes and then I’ll publish them here.

The Perugia meeting was truly inspiring for me. It showed how this new form of journalism continues to grow. As always, I came away impressed by the caliber of the journalists doing the work and their dedication. I was particularly impressed by Farhad and Damakant, who are fact-checking and promise-checking politicians in countries that are not very welcoming to journalists. They show that our work doesn’t just take journalistic skill, it also takes courage.

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How the Rouhani Meter fact-checks Iran’s president from 6,000 miles away

The capital of Iran’s fact-checking movement is not in Tehran, but Toronto.

When Farhad Souzanchi wanted to promote government accountability in his home country of Iran and track the campaign promises of President Hassan Rouhani, his only choice was to open an office in Canada, more than 6,000 miles away. For the last 18 months, the Rouhani Meter — a unique fact-checking website because it is run remotely from another country — has broken new ground in fact-checking journalism.

Since Hassan Rouhani was sworn in as Iran’s seventh president Aug. 3, 2013, Souzanchi and has team have been tracking and updating a list of promises made during Rouhani’s campaign and the first 100 days of presidency. The project, a collaborative effort between ASL19, a research organization that helps Iranians circumvent Iran’s internet censorship, and the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, has researched 73 promises and rated them as Achieved, In Progress, Not Achieved or Inactive.

“When Rouhani came, he campaigned on hope and presented himself as a moderate. He said he would fix the image of Iran on the international stage, and with that came a lot of exciting promises,” Souzanchi said. “Our main goal was to promote conversation over these issues — government accountability and government transparency.”

There is virtually no transparency in Iran, which ranks 173rd out of 180 countries in Reporters Without Borders’ 2014 World Press Freedom Index. The Rouhani Meter is currently the only active fact-checking project in the entire Middle East.

In a world with a 24-hour news cycle and a growing global fact-checking movement, politicians in countries with a free press are growing accustomed to having their words scrutinized. In the United States, White House aides and members of Congress often cite fact-checking websites. But you won’t find Iranian officials citing the Rouhani Meter—they won’t even acknowledge the site’s existence.

“President Rouhani once said that people are monitoring us through the Internet. It was an indirect mention of it,” Souzanchi said. “But they haven’t addressed Rouhani Meter directly. They don’t want to legitimize it.”

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To date, the Rouhani Meter has followed 73 promises made be Iranian President Hassan Rouhani during his campaign and first 100 days in office.

Working from across the Atlantic Ocean, access to reliable information is the biggest challenge the Rouhani Meter staff faces in its day-to-day reporting. Iran’s government maintains tight control over public information. ASL19 policies dictate that their reporting cannot involve collaboration with sources inside Iran, which would pose a risk to the sources’ safety.

The Rouhani Meter is forced to follow the Iranian press and collaborate with journalists working outside the country to check the president’s promises, a tactic that has impressed researchers who study the global fact-checking movement.

“It’s hard to imagine how you go about that without having access to data from the government or groups within the country,” said Lucas Graves, assistant professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. “With how complicated and nuanced these questions very often get, even a seemingly-straight-forward fact-check sometimes takes several days to research. Having seen these processes up close, I can’t imagine the difficulties of having to do this from halfway around the world.”

Without an error to date, the site’s painstakingly meticulous process has paid dividends.

Of the 73 registered promises on the Rouhani Meter, 11 percent are considered “Achieved” and 36 percent are designated “In Progress.” Five percent of promises are labeled “Not Achieved,” with the remaining 48 percent inactive. Promises on the site are broken down into four categories—socio-cultural, domestic policy, economy and foreign policy, which were the pillars of Rouhani’s campaign.

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A sample of some of the socio-cultural promises the Rouhani Meter is currently tracking.

Some promises are easy to check. For example, Rouhani’s promise to re-open Iran’s House of Cinema was easily verified when the theater was opened Sept. 12 by deputy culture minister Hojjatollah Ayoubi. Rouhani’s plan to establish a Ministry of Women is yet to come to fruition, so the promise is designated as “Not Achieved.” Other promises are much more difficult to track, particularly those involving the economy. With little economic data available (and healthy doses of skepticism about that data’s validity), tracking Rouhani’s pledge to increase Iran’s economic growth poses a major challenge. The promise is currently designated by the Rouhani Meter as “In Progress.”

Since its launch on the day of Rouhani’s inauguration, the site has been visited more than 20 million times by 3.6 million unique visitors across the world. The Rouhani Meter is available in English, but the site’s Farsi version makes up more than 95 percent of its traffic. Reports on the site are often written in Farsi before being translated to English, but Souzanchi said that process varies.

Viewing the site from inside Iran presents a challenge all its own. A month after the site launched, it was blocked by the Iranian government. It can still be accessed with Internet circumvention tools and virtual private networks.

Souzanchi indicated that a lack of mainstream accessibility does not affect readership. Internet circumvention is a way of life in the tech-savvy nation of Iran, where nearly three-fourths of the country’s population is under the age of 40.

Iranians are accustomed to using circumvention tools so they can access popular websites Facebook and Twitter, so they can easily use them to see the Rouhani Meter.

“It hasn’t been a problem reaching people,” Souzanchi said.

Despite the Rouhani Meter’s goal to give Iranian citizens access to information, the project has some opponents inside the country’s borders. Much of this is because Souzanchi was inspired to start the site after seeing the Morsi Meter in Egypt, which tracked promises made by President Mohamed Morsi until he was overthrown in a coup.

Because Morsi was ultimately overthrown, conservative Iranians have attacked the Rouhani Meter because they fear the website conspires to carry out similar plots in Iran—a claim that Souzanchi says is not true.

“My answer to those who accuse Rouhani Meter of overthrowing President Rouhani is that our project is not about that,” Souzanchi said. “It is about encouraging political accountability in government. We, and I believe all healthy promise tracking platforms, are focused on accurate reporting based on strong research. Our reports on promises, which may be sometimes positive or negative, are always backed by the best data we have access to.

“In order to be a reliable and transparent source of information, promise trackers cannot and will not side with or against political leadership. Meters and fact-checking websites are ultimately there to help citizens to make informed, evidence-based decisions in a democratic process—and if we did our job, encourage healthy discussion.”

As the site continues to grow, the Rouhani Meter team has launched the Majlis Monitor, a new website that tracks activities in the Iranian parliament. Souzanchi also is looking for ways to expand its coverage to Iranians around the world.

A more challenging long-term goal is the expansion from promise-checking into fact-checking, which Graves said would be an even tougher task for an organization that works remotely. But the organization that refuses to let an ocean, opaque government activities and censored internet access stand in their way thinks it is up to the challenge.

“Through close collaborations with experts, activists, Iran-focused institutions and of course crowdsourcing hopefully we can overcome the challenges of limited access to information as much as possible,” Souzanchi said. “As ASL19’s motto goes, ‘There is always a way!’”

Update, March 17: We clarified our description of the unusual remote approach of the Rouhani Meter to say that it is “a unique fact-checking website because it is run remotely from another country.” As far as we know, it is the only one run entirely from another country, but there are some sites in which fact-checkers in one nation also fact-check claims from another nation.

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Fact-Checking Census finds continued growth around the world

Fact-checking keeps growing around the world, with new sites in countries such as Turkey, Uruguay and South Korea.

The 2015 Fact-Checking Census from the Duke Reporters’ Lab found 89 that have been active in the past few years and 64 that are active today. That’s up from 59 total/44 active when we did our last count in May 2014. (We include inactive sites in our total count because sites come and go with election cycles. Some news organizations and journalism NGOs only fact-check during election years.)

Many of the additional sites have started in the last seven months, including UYCheck in Uruguay and Dogruluk Payi in Turkey. Others are sites that we didn’t find when we did our first count.

You can see the complete list on the fact-checking page of the Reporters’ Lab website, where you can browse by continent and country.

As with our last tally, the largest concentrations of fact-checking are in Europe and North America. We found 38 sites in Europe (including 27 active), 30 in North America (22 active) and seven in South America (five active). There are two new sites in South Korea.

The Truth or False Poll in South Korea enlists readers to help with fact-checking.
The Truth or False Poll in South Korea enlists readers to help with fact-checking.

The percentage of sites that use ratings continues to grow, up from about 70 percent in last year’s count to 80 percent today. Many rating systems use a true to false scale while others have devised more creative names. For example, ratings for the European site FactCheckEU include “Rather Daft” and “Insane Whopper.” Canada’s Baloney Meter rates statements from “No Baloney” to “Full of Baloney.”

We found that 56 of the 89 sites are affiliated with news organizations such as newspapers and television networks. The other 33 are sites that are dedicated to fact-checking such as FactCheck.org in the United States and Full Fact in Great Britain.

Almost one-third of the sites (29 of the 89) track the campaign promises of elected officials. Some, such as the Rouhani Meter for Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani, only track campaign promises. Others, such as PolitiFact in the United States, do promise-tracking in addition to fact-checking.

For more information about the Reporters’ Lab database, contact Bill Adair at  bill.adair@duke.edu

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