It was one of the busiest weeks for American politics in recent memory. On Sunday, President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg aired dueling ads during the Super Bowl. Monday was the Iowa caucuses, which kicked off the primary election season (as of this writing, we still don’t have all of the results). On Tuesday, Trump delivered the annual […]

Who should be responsible for curbing the spread of disinformation? We might start by looking at who is responsible for spreading it. Those of us who follow this topic closely know there are a number of answers to that question: nefarious foreign actors, irresponsible platforms, zealous partisans, politicians who lie with impunity, people who stand […]

Those who are following the tension between the United States and Iran saw that President Donald Trump and the national security team have offered shifting explanations for the airstrike that killed top Iranian military leader Gen. Qassem Soleimani. Obviously, U.S.-based fact-checkers have been following this topic very closely, trying to determine whether the Iranian general […]

Happy New Year! With the start of 2020, we’ve been thinking about what the year might bring to the misinformation and fact-checking world. Of course, hoaxers, manipulators and propagandists will come up with new techniques. And we also expect a new intensity of misinformation, especially around the U.S. election. There will still not be enough […]

For fact-checkers around the world, 2019 was a big year. In October, the Duke Reporters’ Lab counted more than 200 fact-checking projects around the world. Facebook continued to grow its partnership with such organizations, hosting its first fact-checking summit at the company’s Menlo Park, California, headquarters. And misinformation continued to grow as a global problem. Each year, the IFCN […]

In May, Instagram announced that it would block hashtags that promote “verifiably false” information about vaccines. The move came after similar efforts from other social media platforms to restrict vaccine misinformation. But anti-vaxxers have developed some clever workarounds to Instagram’s restrictions. Coda Story reported Dec. 6 that anti-vaxxers have started using coded hashtags to continue promoting the false belief that vaccines […]

Whitney Phillips, an assistant professor of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University, wrote a piece for Columbia Journalism Review saying that disinformation, like environmental pollution, calls for an ecological solution. “Facts won’t save us,” she wrote. Phillips is the author of two books as well as an important paper on disinformation amplification for Data & Society. Now she’s […]

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery. But not in this case. The move by the U.K. Conservative Party’s press office to make its Twitter account look like a real fact-checking site holds implications for fact-checkers’ credibility and presents social media companies with a new test of how to respond to such ploys. There […]

Facebook’s policy of not subjecting politicians’ statements or ads to third-party fact-checking has riled critics in the United States and abroad – including some of the company’s own employees – who say it lets politicians off the hook in an era when the truth is under siege. The reason for the policy, the company says, is that […]

It took Facebook some public and international controversy regarding its policies to open its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, and receive more than 100 fact-checkers. Facebook’s first global Fact-Checking Partner Summit took place Tuesday and Wednesday as a completely off-the-record meeting — an opportunity for fact-checkers and company employees to exchange experiences and concerns regarding the present and […]