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Month: September 2019

From Toronto to New Delhi, fact-checkers find reinforcementsDELFI Melo Detektorius

From Toronto to New Delhi, fact-checkers find reinforcements

Published September 16, 2019 by stepht@duke.edu

The Duke Reporters’ Lab is adding seven fact-checkers from three continents to our global database. That puts our ongoing count of reporting projects that regularly debunk political misinformation and viral hoaxes close to 200.

With this month’s additions, the Lab’s database now counts 195 projects in 62 countries, including every project the International Fact-Checking Network has verified as signatories of its code of principles.

One new addition uses a name that’s inspired many others in the fact-checking community: the polygraph machine, also known as the lie detector. DELFI’s Melo Detektorius (“Lie Detector”) launched last November. It’s the fact-checker for the Lithuanian outlet of a commercial media company that operates digital news channels in the Baltic states and across Eastern Europe.

Many others have used variations of the name before, including the Columbian news site La Silla Vacía’s Detector de Mentiras and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation’s weekly political fact-checking TV program Detektor. There are versions of polygraph too, such as Polígrafo in Portugal and El Poligrafo, a fact-checker for the print edition of the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio. At least three inactive entries in our database used similar names.

The fact-checkers at Spondeo Media in Mexico City avoided the wording, but apparently liked the idea. Instead, they deploy a cartoon polygraph machine with emoji-like facial expressions to rate the accuracy of statements.

Two news sites associated with the TV Today Network in New Delhi and its corporate parent India Today are also recent additions to our database. In addition to the work that appears on India Today Fact Check, the company’s fact-checkers produce reports for the Hindi-language news channel Aaj Tak and the Bangla-language news and opinion portal DailyO. When claims circulate in multiple languages, fact-checks are translated and published across platforms.

“Broadly, the guiding principle for deciding the language of our fact- check story is the language in which the claim was made,” explained Balkrishna, who leads the Fact Check Team at the India Today Group. “If the claim is Hindi, we would write the fact check story in Hindi first. If the same claim appears in more than one language, we translate the stories and publish it on the respective websites.”

While it’s relatively common for fact-checkers in some countries to present their work in multiple languages on one site, it’s less common for one media company to produce fact-checks for multiple outlets in multiple languages.

As we approach a Canadian national election slated for Oct. 21, we are adding two fact-checkers from that part of the world. One is Décrypteurs from CBC/Radio-Canada in Montréal. It launched in May to focus on digital misinformation, particularly significant claims and posts that are flagged by its audience. But the format is not entirely new to the network, where reporter Jeff Yates had produced occasional fact-checks under the label “inspecteur viral.”

The Walrus magazine in Toronto is also focusing on digital misinformation on its fact-checking site, which launched in October 2018.

We have added two other well-established fact-checkers that have a similar focus. The first is the Thai News Agency’s Sure and Share Center in Bangkok. The Thai News Agency is the journalism arm of Mass Communication Organization of Thailand, a publicly traded state enterprise that was founded in 1952 and privatized in 2004.

The other is Fatabyyano, an independent fact-checker based in Amman, Jordan. It covers a wide range of misinformation and hoaxes throughout the Arab world, including nearly two dozen countries in the Middle East and North and East Africa. Applied Science Private University and the Zedni Education Network are among its supporters.

We learned that Fatabyyano’s name is a reference to a holy command from the Quran meaning “to investigate”  from an article by former Reporter’s Lab student researcher Daniela Flamini. She wrote about that site and other fact-checking projects in the Arab world for the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network.

Several of the sites Flamini mentioned are among a list of others we plan to add to our database when we post another of these updates in October.

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Using artificial intelligence to expand fact-checking

Published September 16, 2019 by stepht@duke.edu

As news organizations adapt to the digital age, they’re turning to artificial intelligence to help human journalists produce the content consumers need. This is especially true in fact-checking.

Because politicians often repeat claims – even after they have been debunked – AI can help hold the politicians accountable by quickly finding relevant fact-checks. This technology can also search through vast amounts of content for fact-checkable claims, saving journalists time. 

“Fact-checking is uniquely suited to the use of AI,” said Bill Adair, director of the Duke Reporters’ Lab. 

The Reporters’ Lab uses AI to build tools like Squash, a system under development that fact-checks video of politicians as they speak. The goal is to display related fact-checks on viewers’ screens in a matter of seconds.

Squash listens to what politicians say and transcribes their words, making them searchable text. It then compares that text to previously published fact-checks to look for matches. 

 “We’ve made some huge advancements in the past three years,” Adair said. “Squash has improved in accuracy since we demo’ed it at the State of the Union back in February.”

A screenshot of Squash, a fully automated fact-checking tool under development at The Reporters’ Lab.

This fall, the Squash team is refining its claim-matching technology. Its performance is inconsistent because people can make similar claims using different language.

Reporters’ Lab researchers hope to use more advanced machine learning techniques to help Squash become smarter at recognizing similar meaning even when the words don’t match. That will take time.

 “We’re dependent on technological processes improving,” Adair said. “Voice-to-text and matching algorithms are two big things we’re reliant on and those are continually improving, but still have a long way to go.” 

The Reporters’ Lab is also running user experience testing with Squash this fall to learn more about the most effective ways to display fact-checks on screens. Media researcher Jessica Mahone recently joined the lab to help develop a more effective user experience.   

 Squash could be the first step to a future where instant fact-checking is broadly available on broadcast TV, cable news and even web browsers, all thanks to the power of AI. Eventually viewers of all live political speeches and debates could benefit from Squash.

All of this is part of a larger movement within journalism starting to take advantage of AI’s possibilities. Outlets such as the Associated Press publish stories about sports and earning reports entirely written by computers. Xinhua, the Chinese’ state news agency, is experimenting with producing news broadcasts with virtual news anchors.

The Reporters’ Lab is one of the leading organizations in the world applying AI to fact-checking,  along with outlets FullFact in England and Chequeado in Argentina. The Lab’s Tech & Check Alerts, for instance, use AI to find and share checkable claims for fact-checking journalists around the country, so they do not have to spend time looking themselves. The Alerts have often shared claims that journalists have fact-checked.

It works like this: bots developed by Duke student researchers scrape Twitter posts and CNN transcripts daily to start the hunt for checkable claims. That content is fed to the ClaimBuster algorithm developed at the University of Texas, Arlington, which identifies potentially promising claims for fact-checkers. 

“Reading transcripts and watching TV looking for factual claims takes humans hours, but ClaimBuster can do it in seconds,” Adair said.

The Reporters’ Lab just last week debuted a new alert, The Best of the Bot, intended to flag the best of what the bots dig up. 

“We needed Best of the Bot because our Alerts had become so successful in finding claims that fact-checkers didn’t even have time to read them,” Adair said. “I think of it as a back-to-the-future approach. We now need a human to read the great work of the bot.”

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