Validation Tools

We love to read the news. But in the age of clickbait and biased news, we lost confidence in which stories and sources to trust. So, we came together to solve this problem dear to our hearts - restore faith in the news. OwlFactor automatically calculates the quality of an article based on four factors:

Our.News - now in its beta - provides in-sight tools and add-ons that fact check news stories aggregated from across the internet on the spot. Additionally, Our.News provides downloadable apps such as Newstrition, "a free Chrome and Firefox browser extension that provides background information about news publishers, verified by the Freedom Forum Institute, allowing users to check and rate a story’s sources and also rate the stories themselves."

Fact-Checking Any News Story

In the age of social media, many of us ambiently consume news by reading headlines and descriptions that appear in our news feeds.

Sponsored partly by Microsoft, Newsguard is a plugin for browsers such as Chrome, Mozilla, and Microsoft's Edge that validates news websites for users based on 9 journalistic integrity criteria. Based on this evaluation, the site is given a positive or negative rating, green or red.
(Independently written)

Misinformation Detector is a "decentralized trust protocol" tool that tracks news credibility. The tool analyzes media content as well as how the information spreads. The tool then gives the news organization trust rankings. This fact checking tool also allows journalists and publishers to work with and be partners with the organization.

(Copied by website)

Mediabugs is an organization for reporting errors and problems with media coverage and journalism. The tool contacts journalists after users say there is an error in their stories in order to hopefully correct the stories. The tool allows for conversations about the errors and allows others to more easily identify disinformation.
(Independently writtten)

In video veritas, if we divert the old Latin saying: In video, there is truth! The digital media revolution and the convergence of social media with broadband wired and wireless connectivity are bringing breaking news to online video platforms; and, news organisations delivering information by Web streams and TV broadcast often rely on user-generated recordings of breaking and developing news events shared by social media to illustrate the story. However, in video there is also deception.

We are a joint team of engineers and investigators from CERTH-ITI and Deutsche Welle, trying to build a comprehensive tool for media verification on the Web. The Media Verification Assistant features a multitude of image tampering detection algorithms plus metadata analysis, GPS Geolocation, EXIF Thumbnail extraction and integration with reverse image search via Google.

A new way to assist in evaluating the credibility of media sources

Iffy.news maintains a list of unreliable news/info sites, linked to site-ratings and fact-checks. This WikiCred project will add Wikipedia data to the index, contribute to related Wikipedia articles, and find indicators (via the Wikimedia API) to help programmatically identify fake news sites.

(Copied from website)

"The Hypothesis Project is a new effort to implement an old idea: A conversation layer over the entire web that works everywhere, without needing implementation by any underlying site.

Our team creates open source software, pushes for standards, and fosters community.