Lead Stories is an innovative fact checking and debunking website at the intersection of big data and journalism that launched in 2015. Our editorial team originally used the technology provided by Trendolizer™ (patent granted) to quickly find the most trending content on the internet to write about, but our mantra has always been "Just Because It's Trending Doesn't Mean It's True."
Originally starting as a site about what was currently trending on the internet in general (and in some cases if it was actually true), we gradually shifted into full time fact checking ever since the primaries of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Nowadays we specifically hunt for trending stories, images, videos and posts that contain false information in order to fact check them as quickly as possible. We tend to work very fast because we actively monitor the fake news ecosystem and we don't have to wait for reader tips or reports before getting started on a story. Since February 2019 we are an active part of Facebook's partnership with third party fact checkers. Under the terms of this partnership we get access to listings of content that has been flagged as potentially false by Facebook's systems or its users and we can decide independently if we want to fact check it or not. In addition to this we can enter our fact checks into a tool provided by Facebook and Facebook then uses our data to help slow down the spread of false information on its platform. Facebook pays us to perform this service for them but they have no say or influence over what we fact check or what our conclusions are, nor do they want to.
Since April 2020, we also provide fact checking related advice and services to ByteDance, the company running TikTok.
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