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‘It’s great to be here in Norway!’

Published June 22, 2020 by stepht@duke.edu

My opening remarks for Global Fact 7, delivered from Oslo, Norway*, on June 22, 2020.

I’m going to do something a little different this year. I’m going to fact-check my own opening remarks using this antique PolitiFact Pants on Fire button. You know Pants on Fire – it’s our rating for the most ridiculous falsehoods.

First , I want to say that it’s great to be here in Norway! (Pants on Fire!)

I love Norway because I’ve always loved the great plastic furniture I buy from your famous furniture store IKEA! (Pants on Fire!)

I am accompanied today by this Norwegian gnome, which I know is very much a symbol of your great country! (Pants on Fire!)

Okay….I’m actually here in Durham, North Carolina,, but thanks to the magic of pixels and…Baybars!…I’m with you!

First, some news…

Baybars Orsek and Bill Adair during the broadcast for Global Fact 7.

As you probably know, every year before Global Fact, the Duke Reporters’ Lab conducts a census of fact-checking to count the world’s fact-checkers and we are out today with the number. This is the product of painstaking work by Mark Stencel, Joel Luther, Mimi Goldstein and Matthew Griffin. Our count this year is 290 fact-checking projects in 83 countries. That’s up from 188 in 60 countries a year ago.

I heard that and my first thought was that …. fact-checking keeps growing!

I should note that Mark Stencel has been working hard on this, staying up all night for the last few days to get it done. So I should reveal my secret: we pay him in coffee!

This morning, I’m going to talk briefly about community.

Back in 2014, when we started planning the first meeting of the world’s fact-checkers – in which we could all squeeze into a classroom at the London School of Economics – Tom Glaisyer of the Democracy Fund gave me some important advice. Build a community, Tom said, not an association. The way to help the fact-checking movement was to be inviting and encourage journalists to start fact-checking. We’ve done that because this meeting, and our group, keeps getting larger. You could even say that … fact-checking keeps growing!

And as a bonus, we also managed to establish the Code of Principles, which provides an important incentive for transparency and fairness in your fact-checking.

My favorite example of the IFCN’s spirit of community is the simplest: our email threads. They are often amazing! A fact-checker will write with a problem they are having and community members from all over the world will respond with suggestions and even help them do the work.

Did you see the amazing one a couple of months ago? Samba of Africa Check wrote about a video that claimed to show violence against Africans in China. He knew it was fake but was not sure where it was from, so he circulated the video by email. That led to a remarkable exchange.

A coordinator from Witness in the United States said the video had been posted on Reddit. suggesting it was from New York. Jacques Pezet of Liberation in France took the image and used Google Maps to find the New York intersection where it was filmed. And then Gordon Farrer, an Australian researcher, used Google Street View to identify the business – a dental office called Brace Yourself.

All of this showed up in Samba’s fact-check in Africa Check in Senegal.

Amazing! All the product of our community!

Another great example: the tremendous work by the IFCN bringing together the world’s fact-checkers to debunk falsehoods about COVID-19. The CoronaVirus Alliance has now collected more than 6,000 fact-checks. It, too, is a product of community, organized by Baybars and Cris Tardaguila.

And one more: MediaReview. You’re going to hear about it tomorrow. It grew out of some great work by the Washington Post and we’ve been working on it with Baybars and PolitiFact and FactCheck.org and fact-checkers from around the world that attended a meeting in January. It’s a new tagging system like ClaimReview that you’ll be able to use for videos and images. I’m more excited about MediaReview than anything I’ve done since PolitiFact because it could really have an impact in the battle against misinformation.

Finally, I want to give some shoutouts to two marvelous people who embody this commitment to community. Peter Cunliffe-Jones has been an amazing builder who has done extraordinary things to bring fact-checking to Africa. And Laura Zommer has been tireless helping dozens of fact-checkers get started in Latin America.

Together, they show what’s wonderful about the IFCN: they believe in our important journalism and they have given their time and energy to help it grow.

Our community grows thanks to these wonderful leaders. I look forward to sharing a glass of wine with them — and you — next year in Oslo!

Bundle up!

*Actually, these remarks were delivered from my backyard in Durham, North Carolina.

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Annual census finds nearly 300 fact-checking projects around the world

Annual census finds nearly 300 fact-checking projects around the world

Published June 22, 2020 by stepht@duke.edu

With elections, unrest and a global pandemic generating a seemingly endless supply of falsehoods, the Duke Reporters’ Lab finds at least 290 fact-checking projects are busy debunking those threats in 83 countries.

That count is up from 188 active projects in more than 60 countries a year ago, when the Reporters’ Lab issued the annual census at the Global Fact Summit in South Africa. There has been so much growth that the number of active fact-checkers added in the past year alone more than doubles the total number when the Lab began to keep track in 2014.

There has been plenty of news to keep those fact-checkers busy, including widespread protests in countries such as Chile and the United States. Events like these attract a broad range of new fact-checkers — some from well-established media companies, as well as industrious startups, good-government groups and journalism schools.

Our global database and map shows considerable growth in Asia, particularly India, where the Lab currently counts at least 20 fact-checkers at the moment. We also saw a spike in Chile that started with the nationwide unrest there last fall.

Fact-Checkers by Continent Since June 2019

Africa: 9 to 19
Asia: 35 to 75
Australia: 5 to 4
Europe: 61 to 85
North America: 60 to 69
South America: 18 to 38

But the coronavirus pandemic has been the story that has topped almost every fact-checking page in every country since February.

"creíble, pero..." — From protests to pandemic: Chile’s Factchecking.cl’s has given its mascot a mask.

At least five fact-checkers on the Lab’s map already focused on public health and medical claims. One of the newest is The Healthy Indian Project, which launched last year. But the pandemic has turned almost every fact-checking operation into a team of health reporters. And the International Fact-Checking Network also has coordinated coverage through its #CoronaVirusFacts Alliance.

The pandemic has also turned IFCN’s 2020 Global Fact meeting into a virtual conference this week, instead of the in-person gathering originally planned in Oslo, Norway. And one of the themes participants will be talking about are the institutional factors that have generated more interest and attention for fact-checkers.

To combat increasing online misinformation, major digital platforms in the United States, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Google and YouTube, have provided incentives to fact-checkers, including direct contributions, competitive grants and help with technological infrastructure to increase the distribution of their work. (Disclosure: Facebook and Google separately help fund research and development projects at the Reporters’ Lab, and the Lab’s co-directors have served as judges for some grants.)

Many of these funding opportunities were specifically for signatories of the IFCN’s Code of Principles, a charter that requires independent accessors to regularly review the editorial and ethical practices of each fact-checker that wants its status verified.

A growing number of fact-checkers are also part of national and regional partnerships. These short-term collaborations can evolve into longer-term partnerships, as we’ve seen with Brazil’s Comprova, Colombia’s RedCheq and Bolivia Verifica. They also can inspire participating organizations to continue fact-checking on their own.

Over time, the Reporters’ Lab has tried to monitor these contributors and note when they have developed into fact-checkers that should be listed in their own right. That’s why our database shows considerable growth in South Korea — home to the long-standing SNU FactCheck partnership based at Seoul National University’s Institute of Communications Research.

As has been the case with each year’s census, some of the growth also comes from established fact-checkers that came to the attention of the Reporters’ Lab after last June’s census was published — offset by at least nine projects that closed down in the months that followed.

But the overall trend was still strong. Overall, 68 of the projects in the database launched since the start of 2019. And more than half of them (40 of the 68) opened for business after the 2019 census, including 11 so far in the first half of 2020. And most of them appear to have staying power. Of those 68, only four are no longer operating. And three of those were election-related collaborations that launched as intentionally short-term projects.

We also have tried to be more thorough about discerning among specific projects and outlets that are produced or distributed by different teams within the same or related organizations. The variety of strong fact-checking programs and web pages produced by variously affiliated French public broadcasters is a good example. (Here’s how we decide which fact-checkers to include in the Reporters’ Lab database.)

The increasing tally of fact-checkers, which continues a trend that started in 2014, is remarkable. While this is a challenging time for journalism in just about every country, public alarm about the effects of misinformation is driving demand for credible reporting and research — the work a growing list of fact-checkers are busy doing around the world.

The Reporters’ Lab is grateful for the contributions of student researchers Amelia Goldstein and Matthew Griffin; journalist and media/fact-checking trainer Shady Gebril; fact-checkers Enrique Núñez-Mussa of FactCheckingCL and EunRyung Chong of SNU FactCheck; and the staff of the International Fact-Checking Network. The Reporters’ Lab updates its fact-checking database throughout the year. If you have updates or information, please contact Mark Stencel and Joel Luther.

Related Links: Previous fact-checking census reports

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Pop-up fact-checking moves online: Lessons from our user experience testing

Published June 11, 2020 by stepht@duke.edu

We initially wanted to build pop-up fact-checking for a TV screen. But for nearly a year, people have told us in surveys and in coffee shops that they like live fact-checking but they need more information than they can get on a TV.

The testing is a key part of our development of Squash, our groundbreaking live fact-checking product. We started by interviewing a handful of users of our FactStream app. We wanted to know how they found out about the app, how they find fact checks about things they hear on TV, and what they would need to trust live fact-checking. As we saw in our “Red Couch Experiments” in 2018, they were excited about the concept but they wanted more than a TV screen allowed.

We supplemented those interviews with conversations in coffee shops – “guerilla research” in user experience (UX) terms. And again, the people we spoke with were excited about the concept but wanted more information than a 1740×90 pixel display could accommodate.

The most common request was the ability to access the full published fact-check. Some wanted to know if more than one fact-checker had vetted the claim, and if so, did they all reach the same conclusion? Some just wanted to be able to pause the video.

Since those things weren’t possible with a conventional TV display, we pivoted and began to imagine what live fact-checking would look like on the web.

Bringing Pop-Up Fact-Checking to the Web

In an online whiteboard session, our Duke Tech and Check Cooperative team discussed many possibilities for bringing live fact-checking online, and then, our UX team — students Javan Jiang and Dora Pekec and myself — designed a new interface for live fact-checking and tested it in a series of simple open-ended preference surveys.

In total, 100 people responded to these surveys, in addition to the eight interviews above and a large experiment with 1,500 participants we did late last year about whether users want ratings in on-screen displays (they do).

A common theme emerged in the new research: Make live fact-checking as non-disruptive to the viewing experience as possible. More specifically, we found three things that users want and need from the live fact-checking experience.

Users prefer a fact-checking display beneath the video. In our initial survey, users could choose if they liked a display beside or beneath the video. About three-quarters of respondents said that a display beneath the video was less disruptive to their viewing, with several telling us that this placement was similar to existing video platforms such as YouTube.
Users need “persistent onboarding” to make use of the content they get from live fact-checking. A user guide or FAQ is not enough. Squash can’t yet provide real-time fact-checking. It is a system that matches claims made during a televised event to claims previously checked. But users need to be reminded that they are seeing a “related fact-check,” not necessarily a perfect match to the claim they just heard. “Persistent onboarding” means providing users with subtle reminders in the display. For example, when a user hovers over the label “Related Fact Check,” a small box could explain that this is not a real-time fact check but an already published fact check about a similar claim made in the past. This was one of the features users liked most because it kept them from having to find the information themselves.
Users prefer all the information that is available on the initial screen. Our first test allowed users to expand the display to see more information about the fact check, such as the publisher of the fact check and an explanation of what statement triggered the system to display a fact check. But users said that having to toggle the display to see this information was disruptive.

Users told us they wanted more on-screen explanations, sometimes called “persistent onboarding.”

More to Learn

Though we’ve learned a lot, some big questions remain. We still don’t know what live fact-checking looks like under less-than-ideal conditions. For example, how would users react to a fact check when the spoken claim is true but the relevant fact check is about a claim that was false?

And we need to figure out timing, particularly for multi-speaker events such as debates. When is the right time to display a fact-check after a politician has spoken? And what if the screen is now showing another politician?

And how can we appeal to audiences that are skeptical of fact-checking? One respondent specifically said he’d want to be able to turn off the display because “none of the fact-checkers are credible.” What strategies or content would help make such audiences more receptive to live fact-checking?

As we wrestle with those questions, moving live fact-checking to the web still opens up new possibilities, such as the ability to pause content (we call that “DVR mode”), read fact-checks, and return to the event. We are hopeful this shift in platform will ultimately bring automated fact-checking to larger audiences.

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What is MediaReview?

Published June 11, 2020 by stepht@duke.edu

MediaReview is a schema – a tagging system that web publishers can use to identify different kinds of content. Built specifically for fact-checkers to identify manipulated images and videos, we think of it as a sibling to ClaimReview, the schema developed by the Reporters’ Lab that allows fact-checkers to identify their articles for search engines and social media platforms.

By tagging their articles with MediaReview, publishers are essentially telling the world, “this is a fact-check of an image or video that may have been manipulated.” The goal is twofold: to allow fact-checkers to provide information to the tech platforms that a piece of media has been manipulated, and to establish a common vocabulary to describe types of media manipulation.

We hope these fact-checks will provide the tech companies with valuable new signals about misinformation. We recognize that they are independent from the journalists doing the fact-checking and it is entirely up to them if, and how, they use the signals. Still, we’re encouraged by the interest of the tech companies in this important journalism. By communicating clearly with them in consistent ways, independent fact-checkers can play an important role in informing people around the world.

Who created MediaReview?

The idea for a taxonomy to describe media manipulation was first proposed at our 2019 Tech & Check conference by Phoebe Connelly and Nadine Ajaka of the Washington Post. Their work eventually became The Fact Checker’s Guide to Manipulated Video, which heavily inspired the first MediaReview proposal.

The development of MediaReview has been an open process. A core group of representatives from the Reporters’ Lab, the tech companies, and the Washington Post led the development, issuing open calls for feedback throughout the process. We’ve worked closely with the International Fact Checking Network to ensure that fact-checkers operating around the world have been able to provide feedback.

You can still access the first terminology proposal and the first structured data proposal, as well as comments offered on those documents.

What is the current status of MediaReview?

MediaReview is currently in pending status on Schema.org, which oversees the tagging that publishers use, which means it is still under development.

The Duke Reporters’ Lab is testing the current version of MediaReview with several key fact-checkers in the United States: FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and The Washington Post.

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

We’re also sharing test MediaReview data as it’s entered by fact-checkers. You can access a spreadsheet of fact-checks tagged with MediaReview here.

How can I offer feedback?

Through our testing with fact-checkers and with an ever-expanding group of misinformation experts, we’ve identified a number of outstanding issues that we’re soliciting feedback on. Please comment on the linked Google Doc with your thoughts and suggestions.

We’re also proposing new Media Types and Ratings to address some of the outstanding issues, and we’re seeking feedback on those as well.

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We want your feedback on the MediaReview tagging system

Published June 9, 2020 by stepht@duke.edu

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.

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