Fact Checking
Fact Checking
The Idea
The Internet is a primary source of news and information today, though unlike established media the Internet lacks traditional fact-checking mechanisms. But does the Internet really need traditional fact-checking? Fact-checking general information on the Internet is an abstract and decentralized but relatively straightforward undertaking. Broad classes of falsifiable information, like health advice, superstitions, product marketing and history, have entire websites dedicated to their confirmation or refutation: WebMD, Snopes.com, Amazon Reviews and Wikipedia. Each of these websites has mechanisms to cite sources of information, vote on the credibility of information and solve domain specific problems to each class. Undoubtedly, there is still a tremendous amount of false and inaccurate information on the Internet, but sites like Snopes and Wikipedia do a sufficiently good job of establishing what is true and false that we chose to focus on a slightly element: sourcing Internet information.
To help readers better understand where the information they read in online sources comes from, we propose to develop a design a sort of Turnitin.com for the Internet. Turnitin.com is an online service that analyzes student work for plagiarism by comparing the submitted work to a database of other work and Internet sources. Turnitin generates "originality reports" for each submitted document (sample shown here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/62/Turnitin_sample_report.png ). Our idea would be to have a similar service available to analyze online news stories, blog posts, etc. and show readers where the information comes from originally -- be it a blogger, a press release, another news story -- so that they can better assess the originality and reliability of the report.
Such a service could have two broad advantages to Internet users. First, it would provide them with a better sense of the original source(s) of information they read online. This corresponds (loosely) to the original fact-checking focus, since sourcing, though it does not explicitly indicate whether information is true or false, often provides a strong signal about how accurate and reliable that information is, based on the reputation of its source. Second, this service would also have benefits related to the Turnitin.com plagiarism-detection goal by allowing Internet users to distinguish between news stories (or quotes) that are simply being pulled verbatim from other articles or press releases and those that are the product of original reporting and writing. Ideally, this could serve to reward original journalism and motivate better, more thorough reporting over speedy stories generated primarily by copying and pasting material from other sources.