Validation Tools

Ethiopia Check debunks claims and exposes fake news using its platforms on Facebook (52,000 followers), Twitter (7,000 followers) and Telegram (34,000 followers). Ethiopia Check also provides online tools for the public to check the authenticity of images circulating on social media and distributes an email newsletter to newsrooms across the country.

(Copied from website)

A project of the g0v civic technology community in Taiwan, CoFacts is a fact checking bot for messaging groups. Messages can be forwarded to the CoFacts bot for fact checking by a team of volunteers; the CoFacts bot can also be added to private groups, and will automatically share corrections if a fact-checked piece of false content is shared within the group.

(Adapted from website)

The Youtube Dataviewer is a tool that allows users to extract metadata from Youtube videos. It allows users to track information such as original upload time of videos as well as running a reverse image search on all thumbnails used for videos, making it easier to see whether a video is actually relevant to the event people claim. To find the information, just copy and paste the URL into the dataviewer and search.

(Independently written)

WeVerify’s aim is to address the advanced content verification challenges through a participatory verification approach, open source algorithms, low-overhead human-in-the-loop machine learning and intuitive visualizations. Social media and web content will be analysed for detection of disinformation; contextualised within the broader social web and media ecosystem; and misleading and fabricated content will be exposed as such, both through micro-targeted debunking and a blockchain-based public database of known fakes.

This group is a product of Wellesley College and a grant from the National Science Foundation. It tasks itself with investigating rumors and other claims on Twitter for validity, measuring both the spread of the claim (how many people have read it) and its validity. The site also offers blogs for meta-analysis of the misinformation on Twitter it investigates.

TrustServista uses advanced Artificial Intelligence algorithms in order to provide media professionals, analysts and content distributors with in-depth content analytics and verification capabilities.

Trustworthiness Algorithm
TrustServista determines the trustworthiness of news articles using Artificial Intelligence. The trustworthiness algorithm combines deep content analysis, the publisher's profile, the sources it mentions or directly links to, and the different viewpoints of the same story, from other publishers.

The non­governmental organization Media Reforms Center is an educational platform, founded by Mohyla School of Journalism at National University of ‘Kyiv­Mohyla Academy’, which aims to implement high standards of journalism education in Ukraine, raise the level of media literacy, inform about the danger of propaganda and dissemination of fake information in the media.

The Share the Facts widget provides a new way for readers to share fact-check articles and spread them virally across the Internet. The compact Share the Facts box summarizes the claim being checked and the fact-checkers’ conclusion in a mobile-friendly format. The widgets have a consistent look but can be customized with the fact-checkers’ logos and ratings, such as Pinocchios or the Truth-O-Meter.

First deployed on Election Day in 2018, Project Certeza’s purpose was to identify and deal with false information disseminated, particularly through social networks but also through any other media, that could produce uncertainty or distrust in the citizenry about the electoral authority’s responsibilities as the election is happening.

Bots, short for robots, are computer programs designed to perform specific tasks. The first robots did not have malicious intentions, and even today there are good bots, whose purpose is to demand accountability from politicians, viralize causes for gender equality or help organize the (many) daily tasks of their users. Good right?