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WHAT KEEPS
FACT-CHECKING
ORGANIZATIONS
UP AT NIGHT
Authors: Robert Nemeth, Marius Dragomir
Researcher: Mihaela Groza
FEBRUARY 20 2 1
One of the main challenges for fact-checkers seems to be to better and
more effectively reach their audience. That means, on the one hand,
improved skills and capacity to reach out to a specific group of followers,
but also techniques to more efficiently use social media as an audience
generation tool.
Effective use of social media turns out to be a challenge of high
importance for African fact-checking organizations in our sample in
particular, which have thus far been slow in building a strong follower
base on social media such as Facebook and Twitter.
Credibility has also been mentioned as a major challenge for fact-
checking groups, with 22 out of 30 groups that responded in our poll
saying that the challenge of gaining or maintaining credibility is “very
important” or “fairly important.”
Achieving a higher impact is an important challenge for many fact-
checking organizations as they seek methods that would help them to
both measure and increase their impact. All African fact-checking groups
included in our research indicated the challenge of impact to be “very
important.” Impact of fact-checking remains a research gap as there is no
solid evidence to understand how effective fact-checking is.
Collaboration with mainstream media doesn’t rank high on the fact-
checkers’ priority list as far as challenges are concerned, with only 10 of
them indicating it as “very important.” On the other hand, collaboration
with mainstream news outfits is considered a more important challenge
for fact-checking groups from African countries in our sample, where
internet penetration is relatively low.
Community building is not among the top challenges of the fact-checking
organizations covered by the survey; yet, it is important in countries
where misinformation proliferates.
Key findings
The chart shows the aggregated value of all responses in the survey (see more in Methodology).
Source: CMDS
Reaching the audience seems to be the key impact-related challenge for fact-
checking organizations. A total of 16 out of 30 groups canvassed by our survey
indicated audience reach as being “very important” for them. Concretely, what most
fact-checking organizations deem a highly important challenge is to improve are
their skills and capacity to reach out to a specific group of followers.
There is no particular region or country where learning how to better target the
audience is more or less challenging. Four organizations from each Africa, Asia and
Latin America identified reaching the audience as a very important priority. The
others come from Eastern Europe (2), Western Europe (1) and the Caucasus (1).
Only four groups said that reaching the audience is only a ‘slightly important”
challenge for them (they come from Turkey, the U.S., Bosnia & Herzegovina and
the Baltics), which is arguably not a sign, judging by the profile of the responding
organizations, that audience engagement is not recognized as being important, but
rather an indication that these groups are already advanced in reaching out to their
target audience.
Notably, in Asia, three of the four groups that ranked “reaching the audience” the
highest on their list of impact-related challenges are based in the Philippines. To a
certain extent, this finding is skewed by the higher number of organizations from
the Philippines in our survey.
Yet, the interest in audience engagement could be also proof that the media
environment in the Philippines is worsening, prompting fact-checkers to step up
their efforts to counter state-sponsored propaganda. In one of the latest moves
what most fact-checking
organizations seek to
improve are their skills and
capacity to reach out to a
specific group of followers
Better audience reach
Number of responses
Source: CMDS
against independent journalism in
the country, the regime of President
Rodrigo Duterte refused the
application lodged by ABS-CBN, a
media conglomerate, for the renewal
of its broadcast license. The regime is
also known for its repeated attempts
to muzzle independent journalists.
High-profile Filipino-American
The challenge of reaching the target audience
journalist Maria Ressa, one of the most vocal investigative journalists in the
Philippines, last year was found guilty of “cyber-libel” by a Filipino administration-
controlled court. Ressa is the co-founder of Rappler, a digital news outlet with its
own fact-checking team, which has been widely praised for its collaborative
approach to fact-checking. Two years ago, Rappler was part of a group of 11 news
organizations and three universities that launched Tsek.ph, a fact-checking platform
whose avowed mission was to verify facts related to midterm elections held in the
Philippines that year.
Potential reason for the high level of interest in impact is that, as some of the older
fact-checking organizations say, a second generation of fact-checkers has emerged
in recent years, and their approaches are changing the field. The first generation of
fact-checkers based their work on pure journalism, which produced results, albeit
“not nearly enough.” The second generation is more about “publishing and acting,”
which means that fact-checkers are more proactive in engaging with their
audiences.
Chequeado, an Argentina-based fact-checking platform, launched in 2013 a live
collaborative platform that allowed the audience to participate in verifying facts.
Africa Check, a pan-African verification outlet, has increased its efforts to attract
political parties in their fact-checking projects. In Nigeria, for example, Africa Check
cooperated with the health ministry, health practitioners and NGOs to identify and
expose false news in health reporting.
Others say that focusing only on the internet, which is what most fact-checking
groups, especially grassroots ones, do, is the wrong approach because in many
countries, traditional media, particularly broadcasters, remain the main sources of
news and information. These channels have to be covered by fact-checking to
ensure that a larger audience is being engaged. “Not only should broadcast fact-
checking be adopted more widely, print and online fact-checkers can learn ways to
make their content more engaging by paying attention to broadcast journalists,”
wrote Matthew Riley, an International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) TruthBuzz
Fellow in the U.S.
Using social media in an effective way was indicated as a main impact-related
challenge by most of the respondents in our poll, 14 out of 30 organizations
marking it as “very important,” eight as “fairly important” and seven as “moderately
important.” Only one organization, based in Europe, indicated that social media was
not at all a big challenge for them. This organization is very active on social media,
especially on Twitter where it has almost 10,000 followers, but they prefer to reach
their audience in other ways as well. For them, developing a relationship with
mainstream media and improving the impact of fact-checking are the most
important challenges as far as impact is concerned.
Looking at the geographical breakdown, the effective use of social media is clearly a
top challenge for African fact-checking organizations in our sample. The relatively
low size of their follower base, a few thousand followers on each Facebook and
Twitter and rarely a presence on Instagram, is further proof that they need to do
better there.
Southeast Asian organizations are a similar case. All except for one indicated social
media as a top priority impact-related challenge. The reason why the only group in
the region that marked use of social media as only “fairly important” could be that
they are already very successful in this respect, with millions of followers on both
Facebook and Twitter.
In contrast, no fact-checking group in the Middle East from our sample, regardless
of their success or the size of their follower base (which varies from a few thousands
to more than one million people) thinks that using social media effectively is a an
important challenge.
the effective use of social
media is clearly a top
challenge for African fact-
checking organizations in
our sample
Savvier use of social media
Number of responses
Source: CMDS
All the fact-checking groups that
were covered by our poll have a
Facebook account, all but three have
a Twitter account, and 23 out of the
30 use Instagram as well. All four
African organizations lag behind in
Instagram where they have very few
followers if they are active at all. That
The challenge of using social media effectively
is not surprising as Instagram is not a popular platform in Africa where less than 1%
of the population uses it regularly, according to data from Statcounter.
Using social media effectively can massively boost the reach of fact-checking
organizations. For example, Chequeado increased its traffic nearly ninefold in 2015,
with half a million visits in November 2020 alone. This was partly the result of a
contested presidential election in Argentina that increased the demand for fact-
checking. On the other hand, sharing more and better on social media was key in
their success. Facebook and Twitter accounted for almost half of the website’s
traffic.
Nevertheless, social media doesn’t mean only Facebook, Twitter and Instagram,
even though these are the most popular social networks worldwide. Some
organizations focus instead on dissemination on other channels, especially
messaging platforms, and do it very effectively.
Chat and messaging applications have become a hotbed for spreading
misinformation. As Vernise Tantuco, researcher with Rappler recently wrote,
misinformation often spreads unchecked on these platforms because they are
considered private spaces and thus “trending content often evades detection and
fact checking.” This is not a new phenomenon: in 2018 the messaging platform
WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, had to introduce limits on forwarding messages
after the spread of hoaxes via messages resulted in multiple mob lynchings in India.
Such tendencies have prompted the Turkish fact-checking organization Doğruluk
Payı to extend its work to messaging platforms. The mobile version of their website
makes it easy to share content over WhatsApp, “a truly important feature in the
Turkish context,” the organization’s co-founder Ferdi Özsoy told Poynter.
In a separate development, the Taiwanese Cofacts, a collaborative platform of the
civic community g0v, that combines a chatbot with a hoax database, integrated
within LINE, a popular instant messenger application popular in Asia where
misinformation very often spreads in closed groups such as family groups,
according to Wu Min Hsuan, the community’s deputy CEO. Any user can forward
messages to the chatbot, which then are fact-checked by volunteers before the
chatbot replies to the user.
Gaining or maintaining credibility is another challenge related to impact that many
fact-checking organizations responding to our questionnaire marked as very
important: half of them (15 out of 30) said so. Credibility is a “fairly important”
challenge for seven other organizations, and “moderately important” for five more.
There were two groups, both from the Middle East that marked this challenge as
“slightly important,” and only one, from South Asia, for which credibility is not an
important challenge.
Trust seems to be lower on the list of challenges in the Middle East. On the other
hand, all four African groups canvassed by the research named gaining or keeping
credibility to be among their most important challenges.
Another salient observation is that fact-checking groups belonging to larger
organizations tend to see credibility as more of a challenge than smaller,
independent groups.
The fact that credibility received one of the highest scores in the questionnaire is
not surprising as trust is a crucial issue for every organization aiming to provide the
public with truthful information. In recent years, trust in the media declined to an
all-time low. This is especially true in divided societies, which “seem to trust the
media less, not necessarily because the journalism is worse but because people are
generally dissatisfied with institutions in their countries,” said Nic Newman, lead
author of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2020.
As fact-checking organizations often debunk news items published by news outlets,
being trusted and credible is crucial for their success. That is what distinguishes
them from yet another voice in the information landscape. At the same time, there
trust is a crucial issue for
every organization aiming
to provide the public with
truthful information
Gaining credibility
Number of responses
Source: CMDS
is not much research out there to
know whether audiences, in fact, trust
or distrust fact-checkers, a study by
Petter Bae Brandtzaeg and Asbjørn
Følstad found. They argue that “fact-
checking services should strive to
increase transparency in their
The challenge of gaining/keeping credibility
processes, as well as in their organizations, and funding sources” as a way to increase
trust in their operation.
Most successful fact-checking organizations agree that transparency is key to
strengthening credibility. Prompted by this belief, the International Fact-Checking
Network, curated by the Poynter Institute, carried out last year a review of its code
of principles, one of the few sets of quality standards recognized worldwide and
followed by dozens of other organizations all over the world.
One of the credibility-related problems fact-checkers have been facing for some
time is criticism of their work, especially attacks from politicians who try to
disparage the work done by fact-checkers. In most cases, such attacks are carried out
by populist politicians and groups, which do not like their lies exposed. An analysis
conducted by the Duke Reporters’ Lab during the 2016 elections in the U.S. found
that 97% of the accusations of bias against fact-checkers were accounted for by
conservative websites. Nevertheless, fact-checkers say that, in most cases, such
attacks do not hurt their credibility, but, to the contrary, reinforce the value of their
work.
Almost the entire group of fact-checkers canvassed by our questionnaire said that
they found identifying their audience a challenge, and the need to learn of tools and
skills to measure and boost the impact of their fact-checking important. A total of 13
organizations found such methods “very important” and another 14 “fairly
important.” Two organizations, one from the Western Balkans and another one
from Latin America, indicated that impact as such was “moderately important,” and
only one, from the Baltics, marked it as “slightly important.”
Among all other European organizations, one indicated impact to be a “very
important” challenge whereas all the others marked it as “fairly important.” There
was also only one organization from the Middle East that deemed impact as a top
priority challenge whereas the other three ticked the “fairly important” box. At the
same time, impact is a very important challenge for every African fact-checking
group that participated in our survey.
We do not observe a connection between the size of the fact-checking groups or
their social media audience and their approach to impact in our sample.
The question of whether fact-checking really has impact and, if so, how significant
that impact is, has been debated for years. Various studies have provided mixed
results, but they agree on a number of factors that influence the impact of fact-
checking. Generally, the activity of fact-checking itself is perceived positively by
people who see no harm in the attempt to correct inaccurate information. However,
this perception is less marked among certain audiences and in polarized
environments where it may not lead to concrete changes. For example, a group of
France-based researchers investigated fact-checking related to the 2017 presidential
fact-checking itself is
perceived positively by
people who see no harm in
the attempt to correct
inaccurate information
Boosting impact
Number of responses
Source: CMDS
campaign by Marine Le Pen, the
extreme-right candidate, during
which she often made false or
misleading claims. The study found
that, although checking such claims
improves the voters’ factual
knowledge, it does not affect the
support for the candidate.
The challenge of impact of fact-checking
All these studies suggest that more evidence is needed to actually understand how
effective fact-checking is. As a review of psychological studies states: “The process of
correcting misinformation is complex and remains incompletely understood.”
Nevertheless, there are success stories, especially if success is measured based on
how many people are reached by a specific debunking effort. This is one of the
many website metrics-related factors that donor organizations are interested in,
according to a report by the Reuters Institute. Another measure of impact is the
number of journalists who are paying attention to checked facts. “There’s every
reason to think that the influence on readers and the influence on politicians is
greater when there’s consensus among journalists and when journalists are widely
willing to treat something as debunked that's been thoroughly debunked,” Lucas
Graves of the University of Wisconsin told the National Public Radio (NPR) in
America.
There are times when fact-checking and debunking have an indisputable impact.
During the 2014 presidential elections in Indonesia, for example, hoaxes fueled
social tensions and created havoc, posing a severe threat to how citizens were
informed. Two years later, during the gubernatorial elections in the capital city, the
spread of false information about the leading candidate led to his downfall. But the
2019 presidential election was different thanks to the fact-checking alliance Cek
Fakta, which chased misinformation even on messaging applications like WhatsApp
and Telegram.
Collaboration with mainstream media doesn’t seem to be a top challenge for fact-
checking organizations, with only 10 of the groups that participated in our survey
indicating it as “very important.” One fact-checking group didn’t attach any
importance to it, which could be the result of either the narrower focus of its work,
geared exclusively on medical disinformation, or their success in this area.
Two European fact-checking groups and one from Latin America referred to the
collaboration with the media as “slightly important.” One of the European
organizations doesn’t seem to need mainstream media coverage to reach a large
audience as they already have over half a million followers on Facebook, with their
stories being often read by hundreds of thousands of users.
Collaboration seems to be by far more important a challenge for African fact-
checking groups, one of the reasons being that they only operate in the online
sphere. As internet penetration remains comparatively low in most of Africa, these
groups need media coverage to better disseminate their findings.
Fact-checking groups seem to have assessed the importance of the challenge of
collaborating with mainstream media for them regardless of their size or the level
of media freedom in the country. Responses of fact-checking groups from countries
with captured media varied from “moderately” to “very important.”
Studies suggest that fact-checkers should expand their efforts to partner with news
organizations. As media and development analyst Raji Rasaki writes, using broadcast
journalism to fight misinformation has a huge benefit: “In countries without reliable
internet, radio and TV are the best way to give audiences factual content.”
in countries without
reliable internet, radio and
TV are the best way to give
audiences factual content
Collaboration with mainstream media
Number of responses
Source: CMDS
Many fact-checking groups have
followed the advice. Africa Check, for
example, syndicates its content to
other news organizations to republish
it free of charge, with an attribution.
VERA Files, a non-profit, independent
group in the Philippines, which
focuses on debunking false claims and
The challenge of relationship with mainstream media
misleading statements of public officials, went one step further to sell their stories to
news media outlets, thus generating income that is crucial for their survival.
The 2019 presidential election in Indonesia featured another good example of
collaboration between news media and fact-checking groups. During the second
debate of the candidates, experts and journalists of three fact-checking groups and
24 news organizations gathered in Google Indonesia’s office for a collective fact-
checking exercise. This collaboration has since grown into a coalition of media
outlets and fact-checking groups that track down misinformation during electoral
campaigns.
Another form of cooperation with mainstream media consists of making fact-
checkers available to appear as guest experts in the media. Team members of two
fact-checking projects in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Istinomjer and Raskrinkavanje,
both operating under the umbrella of the organization Zasto Ne (Why Not?) make
an average of three guest appearances a week on different media outlets. “Our staff
is small, but we feel we are making a difference,” said Aida Ajanovic, fact-checking
team coordinator and editor with Zasto Ne.
Since many fact-checkers are trained in journalism, moving from one medium to
another may not seem to be a big challenge.
However, there are snags. For example, fact-checking online is very different from
doing it on television. The Brazilian fact-checking group Lupa often uses graphics to
debunk disinformation. But its director, Cristina Tardaguila, realized how difficult it
is to do it on TV when she was invited on a program produced by the channel
Globonews to explain the debunking work done by her organization around a
microcephaly outbreak. As she said, it was challenging to make healthcare records
interesting on the screen without the infographics, adding that “the minute the show
ended, I realized how I could have done it better. (…) To be better requires someone
from TV by my side translating my article into television.”
Community building, including recruitment and training of contributors is not
among the top challenges of the fact-checking organizations canvassed by our
research; yet, there were 12 groups that marked it as “very important.” Nine groups
think that it is “fairly important” and five found it “moderately important.”
One Latin American and two European organizations indicated community
building as a “slightly important” challenge. There was only one group, also from
Europe, for which community building is not an important challenge at all. It is
remarkable that all four African groups interviewed believe that community
building is a top challenge. Also, almost every East and Southeast Asian organization
found it “very important.”
Creating a community around fact-checkers is especially important in countries
where misinformation proliferates. Indonesia is one of them. There, most of the
43,000 or so online news platforms are not credible sources of information,
according to a CMDS report that cites a survey, according to which one in three
Indonesians encounter misinformation on a daily basis.
In such an environment, there is naturally room for more fact-checking groups.
The Indonesian Anti-Defamation/Slander Community, known as Mafindo, has
been hunting hoaxes since 2015 when a Facebook group named FAFHH (Anti
Slander, Provocation and Hoax Forum) was created by Harry Sufehmi as a
crowdsourced hoax-busting effort, a platform where members would work together
to debunk false news items. As of today, this community has 80,000 members, 17
chapters across the country and more than 300 volunteers. Community building in
the fact-checking field does not only mean more people available to help with
creating a community
around fact-checkers is
especially important in
countries where
misinformation proliferates
Community building
Number of responses
Source: CMDS
debunking hoaxes, but also outreach
of a potentially very large audience,
which can translate into significant
impact.
The challenge of community building
In a media environment populated by an increasing number of players where
essentially anybody has access to both producing and consuming information,
ensuring that truth prevails is extremely important. Elections all over the world
during the past decade have shown how important it is for the public to have access
to accurate information about the people and parties that are going to lead them.
But electoral and political communication is only one area where fact-checking is
important. The Covid-19 pandemic has been proving how important it is to have
access to facts during extreme crises when people’s safety and basic needs are in
peril.
News media naturally have an important role to play in ensuring that truth prevails,
but as the media field continues to fragment and perpetrators of disinformation
have access to increasingly powerful communication tools, the value of fact-
checking will most likely continue to grow. Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact, was
saying back in 2015 that “fact-checking has become a powerful and important new
form of accountability journalism around the world.” It remained so.
Dozens of fact-checking sites, operated by news media organizations, curated by
university students or run by individual journalists, are now in operation all over
the world, holding politicians to account and doing their best to blot disinformation
out of the internet.
But most of them, especially those that are not incubated in a larger media
company, are still struggling to become financially sustainable. Most of them
continue to be financed by grant-making organizations, private philanthropies that
dish out cash to NGOs all over the world. While their effort is laudable, it doesn’t
ensure the longer-term sustainability that these groups need.
Some say that, being a public good, fact-checking should be financed by
governments from public funds. In countries with autocratic leaders, that is hardly a
recipe for success as these are precisely the enemies of fact-checking and free press.
These nations, on the other hand, need fact-checking organizations that work
without any pressures from governments or politicians.
Other experts suggested a paid-content model as a solution where audiences
contribute financially to keep fact-checking groups in business. That is a more
realistic scenario as fact-checking is an activity that serves the general public in the
first place. But convincing people to pay for content is not an easy task, and media
outlets can attest to it.
What is fairly obvious though, wherever the fact-checking field goes, is that its
the Covid-19 pandemic has
been proving how
important it is to have
access to facts during
extreme crises
Fact-checking: where to next?
success and impact will largely
depend on how fact-checking groups
engage with their audience: knowing
them better, reaching out to them
more and more effectively and
gaining their trust. Our research,
summarized in this paper, reinforces
these needs.
This article is based on responses from 30 fact-checking organizations to a
questionnaire that was sent to a total of 102 fact-checking organizations in the
world as following: 33 in Europe, one in Australia, 11 in Africa, 30 in Asia, 14
in North America and 13 in South America. They were asked to indicate the
importance of the listed impact-related challenges on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1
meaning “not at all important”, and 5 meaning “very important.”
The goal of our survey was to understand the needs and challenges of fact-
checking organizations related to the impact of their work as a base for a
series of upcoming webinars with fact-checking groups aimed at helping
their efforts that the Center for Media, Data & Society (CMDS) is planning to
organize in 2021.
The selection of the organizations was made according to their profile, with
geographical diversity, audience and topical focus also taken into
consideration. The questionnaire was sent to the 102 organizations in
November 2020.
Of those, a total of 30 organizations answered the questions, which is a good
response rate for a field like fact-checking that is very small compared to
other communications-related fields.
Nevertheless, the survey has its limitations. As the aim of the survey was to
determine the topic of a series of workshops, the canvassed organizations
were asked to identify challenges related to impact they are faced with in
their work and indicate the importance of these challenges without going into
further details. Therefore it is not known whether the groups identified
certain challenges as having low importance because they are already
successful in that area or because they simply don’t think these challenges are
important. We would like to emphasize that in accordance with the aim of
the project the questionnaire is a part of, the response options factchecking
organizations were given were limited to issues related to impact of
factchecking. Sustainability, fundraising and many other challenges are
clearly important to some of these organizations, but these our outside the
scope of the project, and consequently of the scope of the questionnaire. As
the survey didn’t go into that level of detail, in the paper, we have not
identified any organization by name in relation to its response to the
questionnaire. The concrete examples of fact-checking groups given in the
paper are based on additional desk research that was carried out for this
study.
In spite of these limitations though, we believe that the survey offers
important insights into the challenges that fact-checking organizations are
facing in their extremely important work.
Methodology
