The Promise and Pitfalls of Fact-checking in 2022 (original) (raw)
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International Communication Gazette, 2018
Since 2003 and the emergence of FactCheck.org in the United States, fact-checking has expanded both domestically and internationally. As of February, 2018, the Duke Reporter’s Lab identified nearly 150 active initiatives around the world. Seen as a professional reform movement in the journalistic community (Graves, 2016), this research explores fact-checker perceptions of why the practice is spreading globally at this point in time. Using a phenomenological approach, two focus groups were conducted among fact-checkers during the 2015 Global Fact-checking Summit in London, England. Participants shared rich experiences about conditions and contexts surrounding the emergence and challenges facing their organizations including perceived public disempowerment, declines in journalism, technological changes, and socio-political strife. Ultimately, as the purpose of this research is to help future fact-checkers around the world become aware of the circumstances under which fact-checking is most likely to emerge and thrive (or fail), recommendations from current global practitioners are offered.
Revisiting the Epistemology of Fact-Checking
Critical Review: A Journal of Politics and Society, 2015
Joseph E. Uscinski and Ryden W. Butler (2013) argue that fact- checking should be condemned to the dustbin of history because the methods fact- checkers use to select statements, consider evidence, and render judgment fail to stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry and threaten to stifle political debate. However, the premises upon which they build their arguments are flawed. By sampling from multiple “fact-checking agencies” that do not practice fact-checking on a regular basis in a consistent manner, they perpetuate the selection effects they criticize and thus undermine their own position. Furthermore, not only do their arguments suffer from overgeneralization, they fail to offer empirical quantification to support some of their anecdotal criticisms. This rejoinder offers a study demonstrating a high level of consistency in fact-checking and argues that as long as unambiguous practices of deception continue, fact-checking has an important role to play in the United States and around the world.
Facts are at the core of the democratic process. Politicians neither always tell facts nor commit to what they pledge. Fact-checking refers to efforts focused on correcting misinformation, fighting falsehoods and bringing attention to facts and hard evidence. Fact-checking nowadays is mostly perceived to be a US-centered and journalistic phenomenon. However, in the recent few years, fact-checking has developed significantly and faster than the literature examining it. This paper explored the question of How fact-checking evolved to become a global phenomenon with direct impact on national and transnational politics? The author conducted a critical analysis of the global fact-checking ecosystem, stakeholders, and networks through data produced by Duke Reporters' Lab, International Fact Checking Network (IFCN) and interviews conducted in the annual fact-checking summit in Buenos Aires 2016. Throughout the paper, the author provided two main arguments on the globalisation of fact-checking; the distribution of the phenomenon worldwide and the evolution of the phenomenon to produce networks and institutions. By examining the first argument, a typology of different global trends of fact-checking is produced in relation to various lenses of types, targets and media. By examining the second argument, IFCN is studied as both a model of institutions and Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs). The impact of this accelerating phenomenon is not restricted to tangible, immediate changes but also to a gradual cultural adoption of healthy skepticism towards news and politics. Finally, the paper concludes that fact-checking is no longer a US centered phenomenon. While this phenomenon is led by journalists, it is not exclusive to them. Civil society, entrepreneurs, and citizens also participate in the process of developing fact-checking.
Making a Difference? A Critical Assessment of Fact-Checking in 2012
The enterprise of fact-checking continues to proliferate throughout the U.S. news media to an unprecedented degree. While many welcome this trend, others question the effectiveness of fact-checking and some have even begun to push back. A common critique is that fact- checking has failed to eradicate deceptive and misleading claims by politicians and is therefore ineffective. Others have concerns about the presence of bias in fact-checking work. This report draws on evidence from social science as well as recent interviews with reporters, fact-checkers, critics, and political figures to consider these issues and how they played out during the 2012 campaign. Because fact-checking is relatively young, robust metrics to empirically measure its effectiveness are still being established. Hence, a recurring theme in this report is the difficulty in definitively distinguishing the effects of fact-checking.
Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey
arXiv: Computation and Language, 2021
As online false information continues to grow, automated fact-checking has gained an increasing amount of attention in recent years. Researchers in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) have contributed to the task by building fact-checking datasets, devising automated fact-checking pipelines and proposing NLP methods to further research in the development of different components. This paper reviews relevant research on automated fact-checking covering both the claim detection and claim validation components.
What keeps fact-checking organizations up at night
Center for Media, Data & Society (CMDS), 2021
This article is based on responses from 30 fact-checking organizations to a questionnaire that was sent to a total of 102 fact-checking organizations in the world as following: 33 in Europe, one in Australia, 11 in Africa, 30 in Asia, 14 in North America and 13 in South America. They were asked to indicate the importance of the listed impact-related challenges on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 meaning “not at all important”, and 5 meaning “very important.” The goal of our survey was to understand the needs and challenges of fact- checking organizations related to the impact of their work as a base for a series of upcoming webinars with fact-checking groups aimed at helping their efforts that the Center for Media, Data & Society (CMDS) is planning to organize in 2021.
Checking how fact-checkers check
Research & Politics, 2018
Fact-checking has gained prominence as a movement for revitalizing truth-seeking ideals in journalism. While fact-checkers are often assumed to code facts accurately, few studies have formally assessed fact-checkers’ overall performance. I evaluated the performance of two major fact-checkers in the USA, Fact Checker and Politifact, comparing their inter-rater reliability using a method that is regularly employed across the social sciences. Surprisingly, only one in 10 statements was found to be fact-checked by both fact-checkers. Regarding claims evaluated by both organizations, the fact-checkers performed fairly well on outright falsehoods or obvious truths; however, the agreement rate was much lower for statements in the more ambiguous scoring range (that is, “Half True” or “Mostly False”). The results suggest that fact-checking is difficult, and that validation is challenging. Fact-checkers rarely evaluate statements that are exactly the same, and disagree more often than one mig...
Fact-checking as Idea and Practice in Journalism
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, 2019
Fact-checking has a traditional meaning in journalism that relates to internal procedures for verifying facts prior to publication, as well as a newer sense denoting stories that publicly evaluate the truth of statements from politicians, journalists, or other public figures. Internal fact-checking first emerged as a distinct role in U.S. newsmagazines in the 1920s and 1930s, decades in which the objectivity norm became established among American journalists. While newspapers have not typically employed dedicated fact-checkers, the term also refers more broadly to verification routines and the professional concern with factual accuracy. Both scholars and journalists have been concerned with a decline of internal fact-checking resources and routines in the face of accelerated publishing cycles and the economic crisis faced by news organizations in many parts of the world. External fact-checking consists of publishing an evidence-based analysis of the accuracy of a political claim, news report, or other public text. Organizations specializing in such “political” fact-checking have been established in scores of countries around the world since the first sites appeared in the United States in the early 2000s. These outlets may be based in established news organizations but also “good government” groups, universities, and other areas of civil society; practitioners generally share the broad goals of helping people become better informed and promoting fact-based public discourse. A burgeoning area of research has tried to measure the effectiveness of various kinds of external fact-checking interventions in countering misinformation and promoting accurate beliefs. This literature generally finds that fact-checking can be effective in experimental settings, though the influence of corrections is limited by the familiar mechanisms of motivated reasoning.