Desperate for protection against COVID-19, some people are acting on dangerous misinformation they’ve found online. Fact-checkers need help sharing the articles that debunk the most life-threatening hoaxes. And all authorities should get involved too. In Tunisia and other Arabic-speaking countries, and in North Macedonia and Greece, the dangerous idea of gargling with Betadine — a topical antiseptic […]

Sometimes it feels like the phrase “no good deed goes unpunished” was invented with fact-checkers in mind. This week, it applies to the ones in Spain. Not long after WhatsApp decided to limit message-forwarding in an effort to stem the spread of misinformation, supporters of Spain’s right-wing Vox party started a campaign of digital harassment […]

Last fall, then-presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren ran an ad on Facebook falsely claiming that the tech giant’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, had endorsed President Donald Trump for re-election. It was an obvious stunt. Anyone paying attention knew Zuckerberg hadn’t endorsed Trump. Warren, a fierce critic of Facebook, wanted to call attention to the […]

Today, on this fourth annual International Fact-Checking Day, it’s time to celebrate those who work hard to bring you reliable information and, therefore, they help you make better decisions. On this day, we recognize that fact-checking is indispensable for journalism and for every citizen. It’s also time to pressure the powerful and demand transparency in public […]

The coronavirus has killed more than 20,800 worldwide, and still there are people denying it exists. These are people who, ignoring not only facts but also others’ grief, find time (probably during their quarantine) to push disinformation online about COVID-19. From a fact-checkers’ perspective – and also from a humanitarian point of view – I would suggest […]

Once President Donald Trump declared on Friday that he would use a federal law known as the Stafford Act as the basis for an emergency declaration to assist states with their coronavirus response, it wasn’t long before misinformation started circulating on social media and in text messages. The law essentially allows federal resources to flow to […]

On Tuesday, at 9 p.m., those who attended the latest NICAR conference — the annual data journalism summit held in New Orleans — received an email from the Investigative Reporters & Editors group with an alert that one of the participants had tested positive for the 2019 coronavirus. From that moment on, I and about 1,000 other data journalists […]

News organizations are tracking coronavirus cases as they are confirmed. But what happens when there are suspected cases? Should they be reported too? On the one hand, reporting cases that are suspected but not confirmed could perform a necessary public service for audiences who might have read about the cases on social media or wonder why a school […]

U.S. presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg’s recent campaign video portraying other Democratic candidates as dazed and confused in response to a question he posed during last week’s Las Vegas debate generated considerable discussion in the misinformation and media worlds. The video wasn’t a fake, exactly, but it was edited in a misleading way. The imagery in the footage […]

A recent study published by Science Advances raises an interesting question: when it comes to health information, do “interventions aimed at combating false and unsupported information really work?” Researchers from Dartmouth College, IE University in Spain and other institutions studied how Brazilians responded to corrective information about outbreaks of the Zika virus and yellow fever in recent […]