Image result for fact-checking or debunking
  1. Within the strategy trust and verification, as mentioned by the text “Dead Reckoning,” the authors touched upon the specific approach of ‘debunking’ or fact-checking. This strategy of intervention is said to help determine the accuracy of the information that we come across on the web. With the expansion of the use of technology as a method of communicating and mass spreading information, most people are either skeptical of the information they come across or they blindly believe it. With the use of this method, Data and Society —authors of “Dead Reckoning”— claim that it will be more clear for readers to deem information as accurate or not. The spread of this dynamic ultimately led to the development of coalitions throughout the nation. With this growing idea of verifying political information through coalitions, international coalitions emerged as well, making fact-checking a worldwide dynamic.
  2.  Case Studies/Potential examples:
  • According to Wikipedia, Poynter is a certified fact-checking website and they have a wide scale of fact-checkers that work to determine the accuracy of certain news media. In “Politicians are launching their own fact-checking projects. Here’s why that’s problematic,” Poynter speaks about the growing number of politicians that are using fact-checking when publishing works in order to obtain more voters. Politicians from around the world, like Mexico and India, use fact-checking to publicly verify that their information is accurate. With this public display of verification, the voters get a sense of legitimacy from the politicians and are more likely to agree with their ideals. 
  • According to Wikipedia, the Nikkei Asian Review is an English-based business journal that touches upon works that relate to international business and politics. The article, “Indian fact-checkers step up fight against ‘fake news’,” delves into a case study of India that pertains to the growing use of fact-checking or debunking. Many Indian politicians are incorporating fact-checking into political reports in order to lessen the spread of fake news. They believe that it will help with the accuracy of information being presented to voters in national elections. Facebook is also in support of this growth of fake news awareness in India, and is paying a Mumbai-based fact-checking service to monitor the Karnataka election in India. The notions of fact-checking is being promoted worldwide.

3. Wikipedia: Wikipedia says that fact-checking is a method used to determine the veracity of information that are claimed as factual. The purpose of this method is to highlight incorrect information resided within a text or statements and ultimately reject or disregard those pieces of information. There are numerous organizations that solely focus on fact-checking information on the web and there are also websites that are dedicated to that purpose as well— Snopes, Politifact, FactCheck, etc. Fact-checking also works to correct misconceptions of certain texts or information, whether that be hoaxes or exaggerate content. The use of fact-checking grew throughout the nation because more and more people were realizing the inaccuracy of some information they were coming across like political news. 

Deciding What’s True: Author Lucas Graves speaks about fact-checking having a long history — about a decade— in our political world. Journalists’ jobs are now not only to report news, but to also verify that whatever they are claiming is factually correct. With the spread of fact-checking organizations, this dynamic has grown significantly, especially during election times. 

FactCheckEU: This fact-checking coalition website is a unit of the fact-checking website Poytner. Poytner is an American-based fact-checking coalition that acts to lessen the amount of misinformation spreading throughout the web. However,  FactCheckEU is specific to European nations. Within this website, there are numerous outlets that pertain to specific European nations and is written in their languages. Each outlet designed to fact-check the information within that specific nation. 

GDI: This international fact-checking coalition is composed of 12 experts from Berlin, Germany to San Francisco, California. Their team is made up of experts with backgrounds in media, journalism, cybersecurity, and ad-tech. The mission of this website is to expose misinformation as well as lessen the amount of disinformation on the web. In order to deem a text as disinformation, this organization makes artificial intelligence review the work as well as journalists or human-checking. 

First Draft News: First Draft News is a global organization that is dedicated to lessening the amount of fake news on the web. Not only does this organization take part in debunking, but they also work to train more members in fact-checking so this dynamic can spread even further. Currently, First Draft News is working on implementing fact-checking in multiple nations like the US, the UK, France, Germany, Brazil, and Nigeria – and they have plans to expand even further.  

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s