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Month: January 2018

What to expect tonight from FactStream, our live fact-checking appSpaceX

What to expect tonight from FactStream, our live fact-checking app

Published January 30, 2018 by stepht@duke.edu

Tonight we’re conducting a big test of automated fact-checking. Users around the world will be able to get live fact-checks from the Washington Post, PolitiFact and FactCheck.org on our new FactStream app.

It’s an ambitious experiment that was assembled with unusual speed. Our team – lead developer Christopher Guess, project manager Erica Ryan and the designers from the Durham firm Registered Creative – built the app in just three months. We were still testing the app for bugs as recently as Sunday night (we found a couple and have fixed them!).

FactStream, part of the Duke Tech & Check Cooperative, is our name for apps that provide live fact-checking. This first version will rely on the fact-checkers to identify claims and then push out notifications. Future versions will be more automated.

We’re calling tonight’s effort a beta test because it will be the first time we’ve used the app for a live event. We’ve tested it thoroughly over the past month, but it’s possible (likely?) we could have some glitches. Some things that might happen:

  • President Trump might make only a few factual claims in the speech. That could mean you see relatively few fact-checks.
  • Technical problems with the app. We’ve spent many hours debugging the app, fixing problems that ranged from a scrolling glitch on the iPhone SE to a problem we called “the sleepy bug” that caused the app to stop refreshing. We think we’ve fixed them all. But we can’t be sure.
  • Time zone problems. If you set an alert for tonight’s speech before we fixed a time zone bug this morning, you got a notification at 3 p.m. Eastern time today that said “2018 State of the Union Address will begin in fifteen minutes.” Um, no, it’s at 9 p.m. Eastern tonight. But we believe we’ve fixed the bug!

(I’m writing this at the suggestion of Reporters’ Lab co-director Mark Stencel, who notes that Elon Musk has highlighted video of his rockets exploding to make the point that tests can fail.)

The future of fact-checking is here. Our goal tonight is to test the app and explore the future of automated journalism. We’re excited to try – even if we encounter a few problems along the way.

I hope you’ll try the app and let us know what you think. You can email us at team@sharethefacts.org or use this feedback form.

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Want to help us test our fact-checking app during the State of the Union?FactStream

Want to help us test our fact-checking app during the State of the Union?

Published January 26, 2018 by stepht@duke.edu

The Duke Reporters’ Lab is seeking beta testers for FactStream, our new second-screen app that will provide live fact-checking during political events.

On Tuesday, Jan. 30, the Reporters’ Lab will partner with PolitiFact, The Washington Post and FactCheck.org, which will provide FactStream users with live fact-checking of President Trump’s State of the Union address.

FactStreamThroughout the speech, FactStream users will see pop-ups on their screen, alerting them to previously published fact-checks or real-time analyses of President Trump’s claims. By pressing on a pop-up, users can read the full text of a fact-check, share the fact-check on various social media platforms or simply receive additional context about Trump’s statements.

FactStream is a product of the Duke Tech & Check Cooperative, a $1.2 million effort that uses automation to help fact-checkers do their work and broaden their audience. Launched in September 2017, Tech & Check also serves as a hub to connect journalists, researchers and computer scientists who are doing similar work.

The first iteration of FactStream is a manual app that requires the work of human fact-checkers behind the scenes. It is an important first step toward the “holy grail” of fact-checking — automated detection of a claim that is instantly matched to a published fact-check.

If you are an iPhone or iPad user and would like to test FactStream during the State of the Union, here’s how:

(1) Download FactStream from the App Store.

(2) Open and use the app during President Trump’s speech (Jan. 30 at 9 p.m. ET), making sure to test the app’s various screens and shared fact-checks.

(3) After the speech is over, send us feedback about the app with this Google Form.

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Bloomberg editor discusses Greek life at Duke, new book on the hazards of fraternitiesJohn Hechinger

Bloomberg editor discusses Greek life at Duke, new book on the hazards of fraternities

Published January 25, 2018 by stepht@duke.edu

“Insurance companies have rated fraternities just above toxic waste.”

John Hechinger, a senior editor at Bloomberg News, addressed a room of Greek-affiliated and unaffiliated Duke undergraduates on Jan. 23, devoting a portion of his lecture to the issue of liability insurance within fraternities.

“You should know this,” he said solemnly. “Students are taking the liability on themselves. You’re likely to be named if someone dies.”

John Hechinger
John Hechinger (left) and Duke professor John Burness discuss Hechinger’s book, “True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities.” Photo by Bill Adair.

In September 2017, Hechinger published True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities, an exposé of American fraternity life. The book offers a deep dive on Sigma Alpha Epsilon, a historically white fraternity that has made headlines for sexual assault, racism and alcohol-induced deaths during hazing.

“There had never been an African-American member of SAE, and I wanted to explore that,” Hechinger said during a discussion provocatively titled, “Can Fraternities Be Saved? Can They Save Themselves?”

“Turns out at the University of Alabama, there are a whole bunch of fraternities… none of them have ever had African-American members,” he continued.

Hechinger said the lack of diversity that exists among historically white fraternities can be seen on Duke’s own campus.

“It’s an extreme example of what the Duke Chronicle is now writing about,” he said, referencing a Jan. 19 article that examined socioeconomic and geographic diversity within Duke fraternities and sororities.

But Hechinger said Duke’s Greek system is still very different from those at other universities. He identified Duke’s efforts to delay rush until the spring semester of each school year and bolster non-Greek social organizations, such as Selected Living Groups, as successful ways to create a safer campus environment.

“I think Duke does a lot of things right,” he said.

One student asked Hechinger how Duke administrators could be more transparent about fraternities. “It takes exposure to force an organization to change,” he responded. “I’d like to see all the reports of sexual assault disclosed and mapped so you can see where they happen… and know the demographics, too.”

Although national fraternities have been thrust into the limelight over scandal and death, Hechinger said fraternities are more popular than ever.

True Gentlemen“They are popular for a reason,” Hechinger said. “People really find value in them. Research shows that people who belong to fraternities believe they’ve had a better college experience and have a better sense of well-being.”

Hechinger also said fraternities provide members with powerful networks upon graduation.

Fraternity men tend to earn higher salaries after college than non-fraternity men with higher GPAs, according to Bloomberg News. They also dominate business and politics. Fraternity members make up about 76 percent of U.S. senators, 85 percent of Supreme Court justices and 85 percent of Fortune 500 executives, according to The Atlantic.

“That’s a testament to the power of networking,” Hechinger said.

For this reason, universities and fraternities have a tenuous relationship. “They infuriate, yet need, each other,” Hechinger writes in his book. “College administrators who try to crack down on fraternity misbehavior often find themselves confronting an influential, well-financed and politically connected adversary.”

Hechinger concluded his lecture by advocating for institutional change.

“If fraternities grapple with these issues, particularly the diversity issue, I think they do have a future,” he said. “I hope they focus more on values of brotherhood.”

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New Tech & Check projects will provide pop-up fact-checkingFactStream

New Tech & Check projects will provide pop-up fact-checking

Published January 16, 2018 by stepht@duke.edu

For years, fact-checkers have been working to develop automated “pop-up” fact-checking. The technology would enable users to watch a political speech or a campaign debate while fact-checks pop onto their screens in real time.

That has always seemed like a distant dream. A 2015 report on “The Quest to Automate Fact-Checking” called that innovation “the Holy Grail” but said it “may remain far beyond our reach for many, many years to come.”

Since then, computer scientists and journalists have made tremendous progress and are inching closer to the Holy Grail. Here in the Reporters’ Lab, we’ve received $1.2 million in grants to make automated fact-checking a reality.

The Duke Tech & Check Cooperative, funded by Knight Foundation, the Facebook Journalism Project and the Craig Newmark Foundation, is an effort to use automation to help fact-checkers research factual claims and broaden the audience for their work. The project will include about a half-dozen pop-up apps that will provide fact-checking on smartphones, tablets and televisions.

One key to the pop-up apps is a uniform format for fact-checks called the ClaimReview schema. Developed through a partnership of Schema.org, the Reporters’ Lab, Jigsaw and Google, it provides a standard tagging system for fact-checking articles that makes it easier for search engines and apps to identify the details of a fact-check. ClaimReview, which can be created using the Share the Facts widget developed by the Reporters’ Lab, will enable future apps to quickly find relevant fact-checking articles.

“Now, I don’t need to scrape 10 different sources and try to wrangle permission because there’s this database that will be growing increasingly,” says Dan Schultz, senior creative technologist at the Internet Archive.

This works because politicians repeat themselves. For example, many politicians and analysts have claimed that the United States has the highest corporate tax rate.

FactStreamThe Reporters’ Lab is developing several pop-up apps that will deliver fact-checking in real time. The apps will include:

  • FactStream, which will display relevant fact-checks on mobile devices during a live event. The first version, to be tested this month during the State of the Union address Jan. 30, will be a “manual” version that will rely on fact-checkers. When they hear a claim that they’ve checked before, the fact-checkers will compose a message containing the URL of the fact-check or a brief note about the claim. That message will appear in the FactStream app on a phone or tablet.
  • FactStream TV, which will use platforms such as Chromecast or Apple TV for similar pop-up apps on television. The initial versions will also be manual, enabling fact-checkers to trigger the notifications.

Another project, Truth Goggles, will be a plug-in for a web browser that will automatically scan a page for content that users should think about more carefully. Schultz, who developed a prototype of Truth Goggles as a grad student at the MIT Media Lab, will use the app to experiment with different ways to present accurate information and help determine which methods are most valuable for readers.

The second phase of the pop-up apps will take the human fact-checker out of the equation. For live events, the apps will rely on voice-to-text software and then match with the database of articles marked with ClaimReview.

The future apps will also need natural language processing (NLP) abilities. This is perhaps the biggest challenge because NLP is necessary to reflect the complexities of the English language.

“Human brains are very good at [NLP], and we’re pretty much the only ones,” says Chris Guess, the Reporters’ Lab’s chief technologist for Share the Facts and the Tech & Check Co-op. Programming a computer to understand negation or doublespeak, for instance, is extremely difficult.

Another challenge comes from the fact that there are few published fact-checks relative to all of the claims made in conversation or articles. “The likelihood of getting a match to the 10,000 or so stored fact-checks will be low,” says Bill Adair, director of the Reporters’ Lab.

Ideally, computers will eventually research and write the fact checks, too. “The ultimate goal would be that it could pull various pieces of information out, use that context awareness to do its own research into various data pools across the world, and create unique and new fact-checks,” Guess says.

The Reporters’ Lab is also developing tools that can help human fact-checkers. The first such tool uses ClaimBuster, an algorithm that can find claims fact-checkers might want to examine, to scan transcripts of newscasts and public events and identify checkable claims.

“These are really hard challenges,” Schultz says. “But there are ways to come up with creative ways around them.”

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