Discover how fact-checking helps combat misinformation, enhance credibility, and build trust in the era of fake news.
What is fact-checking?
It is the process of checking the veracity of information by carefully analysing sources and confronting them with available data. The aim is to promote the veracity and accuracy of information, which is particularly important in an age of disinformation. It is dealt with by various actors, including the media, NGOs and academic institutions.
For audiences, fact-checking is a tool that helps verify information, raise awareness and build trust. Specifically, it enables people to check whether claims are true, educates them about misinformation and fake news. It is therefore worth visiting the websites of organisations that verify information. For example, it is worth looking at Snopes, one of the oldest sites, founded in 1994, and PolitiFact, an American site that verifies politicians’ statements. That is why its creators were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2009. In Poland, on the other hand, there are organisations such as Demagog, which verifies the statements of politicians and fights disinformation.
Contemporary research on fact-checking
Contemporary research on fact-checking includes a variety of approaches and contexts. For example, the analyses of the FakeWatch project, which was developed to detect fake news related to elections in North America. Researchers used both traditional machine learning techniques and modern language models to create effective tools for identifying fake news (Raza et al., 2024). Another study analyses disinformation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian-Ukrainian war. It identifies similarities and differences in the spread of fake news in these two contexts. This study found that social media, such as Facebook and X (Twitter), play a key role in amplifying disinformation (Sánchez del Vas & Tuñón Navarro, 2024). Another study compares people’s trust in information generated by large language models, such as ChatGPT, compared to that written by humans. The results suggest that trust in AI-generated content depends on context and awareness of authorship (Buchanan & Hickman, 2024).
Bibliography
Raza, S., Khan, T., Chatrath, V., Paulen-Patterson, D., Rahman, M., & Bamgbose, O. (2024). FakeWatch. A Framework for Detecting Fake News to Ensure Credible Elections. Social Network Analysis and Mining, 14(1), 142. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13278-024-01290-1
Sánchez del Vas, R., & Tuñón Navarro, J. (2024). Disinformation on the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine War. Two Sides of the same Coin? Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03355-0
Buchanan, J., & Hickman, W. (2024). Do People Trust Humans More Than ChatGPT? Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 122, 102239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socec.2024.102239