Truthiness/platforms

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Note; Fact-checking platform analysis originally developed by @tglaisyer and @lela010101 in support of http://mediapolicy.newamerica.net/fact_checking. Much of the material is taken from 'About Us' pages and FAQs. Copied to this wiki to be useful for the hack day for adding to. Sorry I can't be there - Tom

(Feel free to copy / edit)

  • AZ Fact Check AZ Fact Check is a service of The Arizona Republic, azcentral.com, 12 News and the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. Its goal is to research and report on the accuracy of statements involving key topics and political races in Arizona. Users are invited to submit issues and political statements to be reviewed by editors at The Arizona Republic, azcentral.com and 12 News before publication. Statements are researched by professional reporters as well as ASU journalism students working closely with reporters and editors. AZ Fact Check uses star ratings that work as a meter. Ratings fall between zero and four stars depending on analysis of the statement. The star scale is meant to be a quick snapshot of the accuracy of the statement. For a full report and understanding of assigned rating, there is also analysis provided on web site.
  • Bama Fact Check Bama fact Check is an Alabama-based, statewide partnership of newsgathering organizations which check factual claims by politicians and public figures in Alabama. Regular investigations into the statements of state and local politicians and public figures with the priority in policy ideas of political figures. Each political statement researched by Bama Fact Check will receive a „Truth Rating“ raging from 0 to 5, from a group of staff members. Readers can request fact check of specific statements. Partners in the project include The Anniston Star, The Decatur Daily, The Dothan Eagle, The Florence TimesDaily, The Opelika-Auburn News, The Tuscaloosa News and WVTM-TV in Birmingham.
  • Churnalism is an independent, non-profit website built by the Media Standards Trust (charity number 1113680) to help the public distinguish between original journalism and ‘churnalism’.
  • FactCheck FactCheck.org is a non-partisan and non-profit website that describes itself as a 'consumer advocate' for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in US politics. FactCheck publishes short reports on statements by politicians which include inaccurate, misleading, or false claims. FactCheck has also targeted misleading claims from various partisan groups. Readers can interact by using Ask Fact Check (seeking confirmation for dubious claims) or through Mailbag (comments of analyses sent by e-mail and published on site) It is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
  • Fairness and accuracy in Reporting FAIR is a national media watch group, has been offering criticism of media bias and censorship since 1986. It aims to invigorate the First Amendment by advocating for greater diversity in the press and by scrutinizing media practices that marginalize public interest, minority and dissenting viewpoints. As an anti-censorship organization, it exposes neglected news stories and defends working journalists. As a progressive group, FAIR believes that structural reform is ultimately needed to break up the dominant media conglomerates, establish independent public broadcasting and promote strong non-profit sources of information. Uniquely, FAIR works with both activists and journalists.
  • FlackCheck Flack Check is a sister project of FactCheck.org that will be launched fully in January 2012. New site takes all informations from FactCheck.org and turns it into short, funny videos. Aim is to approach readers/viewers in a less serious way, through funny videos that everybody will remember. It will use humor and parody in videos to expose deception and manipulation in political speech and political ads in the 2012 campaigns. The worst of the political ads will be deconstructed and debunked, calling out factual inaccuracies and pointing out the visual cues and music and sound effects that enhance deception and manipulation. Flack Check is the project of Annenberg Public Policy Centre of the University of Pennsylvania. Site is already running but expected to be launched in its full version in January of 2012.
  • The Fact Checker – Washington Post Washington Post Fact Checker describes itself as - Truth behind the Rethoric. It is a feature on Washington Post web site and accompanying column in The Post with the mission to 'truth squad' the statements of political figures regarding issues of great importance, national or local. Areas of interest are: President, Congress, GOP candidates, Political Ads and other issues. It grades politicians on the factual accuracy of their statements with one to four Pinocchios. Pinocchio Tracker – is a special feature that tells at a glance how the various candidates have fared in Pinocchio checks. Washington Post relays on its readers to ask questions and point out statements that need to be checked. Readers can even vote on what topics they need to have addressed. Washington Post Fact Checker was created in 2007 by post diplomatic writer Michael Dobbs specifically for 2008 presidential campaign. It was shutdown in 2008 and relaunched with a broader focus at the begining of 2011 with Glenn Kessler in charge.
  • Fark Fark is a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site. It is community website that allows members to comment on a daily batch of news articles and other items from various websites. Links are submitted by Fark members (collectively referred to as "Farkers"), which admins can approve ("greenlight") for posting on either the main page or one of the subsidiary tab pages. The site receives approximately 2,000 story submissions per day and approximately 50 of them are publicly displayed on the site. Founder Drew Curtis says the stories are selected without intentional political bias, but that he rather tries to run both far-left and far-right articles. All links, whether approved or not, have associated threads where users can comment on the link. Greenlit links can generate upwards of 300,000 page views in one month for the recipient. This can generate enormous amount of traffic in such a short a time that smaller websites are often rendered inoperable due to congestion. This is colloquially referred to as the website being „farked“ by the community. As of June 2009, the site boasts approximately four million unique visitors per month, which puts it among the top 100 English language websites.
  • Grammarly Grammarly is a tool that helps in detecting plagiarism and improving texts. Grammarly offers following functions to its users: check papers for plagiarism, grammar, style and more; avoid plagiarism by checking for originality and generating citations; instantly proofread text and correct over 150 types of errors; enhance vocabulary usage with context-optimized suggestions.
  • Health News Review Gary Schwitzer launched HealthNewsReview.org in 2006 to improve the quality of patient decision making when it comes to choosing health care. The site does this by reviewing stories in the media regarding health care treatments and issuing a rating for each story. In this way, Health News Review has become the watchdog of health care journalism. The site currently gets 5,000 unique visitors a day and reviews news stories dealing with new treatments, drugs, and health care policies. For each story, the site issues a rating of one to five stars based on ten criteria, including how costs of treatments are described in the news story, if independent sources are used, and whether alternative sources of treatment are given attention. More than 25 physicians and freelance journalists trained in evaluating scientific and medical evidence are members of the team. By the time the site posts a review for any given story, at least three of team members will have combed through the story to issue a rating. Health News Review is a nonprofit and is funded by annual grants from the Boston-based Foundation for Informed Medical Decision Making.
  • Hypothesis.is Hypothes.is is non-profit project initiated in 2011 with the expected launch in 2012 with the aim to build an peer review system based on crowd-sourcing - to check, verify and critique content all over the Web - and beyond. Hypothes.is will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a model of community peer-review. It will work as an overlay on top of any stable content, including news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more-without requiring participation of the underlying site. It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO (National Information Standards Organization), O'Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions. The project was initiated by Dan Whaley and a team of long-time leaders of the Internet community. Whaley is coder and entrepreneur who built the first web-based travel reservation system and the company around it – Internet Travel Network; today he is a Director of Sauce Labs, leaders in open-source functional testing
  • Icorrect Icorrect advertises itself as universal website for corrections to lies, misinformation and misrepresentations. ICorrect places the accusation and correction next to each other on the page, and promises to provide a permanent place for people and companies to battle misinformation. In practice it is celebrity oriented web site where they place corrections of published tabloid-like information. Anyone can join the site and become a corrector if they pay $1,000 a year and use the site to shoot down any claims or rumors that plague them. Basically, Icorrect allows its members/correctors to claim or dispute whatever they like without any verification or evaluation process. Icorrect was launched in 2011, by Sir David Tang, who also launched the luxury retailer Shangai Tang. Site employs roughly thirty-five founding members or correctors who make sure the sites run smoothly.
  • Iglue Iglue is a project that combines semantic web and annotation tool. It creates an additional information layer over web pages by using natural language technology to understand its content. The browser plug-in or bookmarklet recognizes names of relevant entities in text, such as people, geographical locations, institutions etc. and then when a user rolls their mouse over those entities, displays related information, images and videos. Information already existing on Internet are here presented in a new form. Users can contribute to this structured data via the plug-in's annotation tool by entering their own entries and data, potentially turning any website into a Wikipedia-like resource. Iglue is developed by In4 Ltd. which is funded by Power of the Dream Ventures, the Hungarian technology acquisition and development company, along with undisclosed private investors to the to the tune of $1.1m. Iglue was unveiled at TechCrunch Europe’s GeeknRolla event in London last April, after 3 years of making.
  • MediaBugs: MediaBugs is a service for reporting specific, correctable errors and problems in media coverage. The aim is to improve the accuracy, clarity and fairness of media coverage by providing discussion space between journalist and and the public as well as to correct already published errors. Users are invited to submit reports on misinformation/wrong statements in a news items in print, broadcast or online. MediaBugs provides a neutral and moderated discussion space and alerts journalists or news organizations involved in citizen's reports. MediaBugs is funded with a grant from the Knight News Challenge. All software is released under open source license. Site lists 3 employees with project advisors.
  • Media Cloud Media Cloud is an open source platform that allows researchers to answer quantitative questions about the content of online media. It started out of motivation to examine emerging news ecosystem without time-consuming content analysis process. Using Media Cloud, researchers, journalism critics and interested citizens can examine what media sources cover which stories, what language different media outlets use in conjunction with different stories, and how stories spread from one media outlet to another. At its most basic, Media Cloud gives a picture of what journalists and bloggers are writing about by counting the words used in recent stories. Technically, Media Cloud performs five basic functions -- media definition, crawling, text extraction, word vectoring, and analysis. Through these processes, substantive content (without ads, navigation...) is broke down into a set word counts – which makes it easy to count - down to the level of individual sentences, which words which media sources are using to talk about which topics. Finally, there is a set of tools for analyzing those word counts, including the Media Dashboard tool that acts as the front page for http://mediacloud.org. All of the code for the system is available under an open source license. Berkman Center relaunched Media Cloud in May, 2011. Project was initiated by faculty and friends of Berkman Centre and with the support of the MacArthur Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
  • MediaMatters for America: Media Matters is not-profit, web based research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing, and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media. It systematically monitors a cross section of print, broadcast, cable, radio, and Internet media outlets for conservative misinformation — news or commentary that is not accurate, reliable, or credible and that forwards the conservative agenda — every day, in real time. Media Matters publishes rapid response as well as longer research and analytic reports such are: study of 1,377 U.S. newspapers and the 201 syndicated political columnists as well as study of the guest appearances on leading TV shows. Media Matters analyzes the dominant American news sources including NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX as well as newspapers. Its techniques include content analysis, fact checking, monitoring, and comparison of quotes or presentations from media figures to primary documents from government. Additionally, Media Matters works daily to notify activists, journalists, pundits, and the general public about instances of misinformation, providing them with the resources to rebut false claims and to take direct action against offending media institutions. Organization has launched several spin off projects, most notably the Conservative Transparency website in 2009, aimed at tracking the funding of conservative activist organizations and Equality Matters in support of gay equality in 2010.
  • MeettheFacts.com Meet the Facts describes itself as non-partisan, grassroots effort to return some integrity and relevance to Sunday morning television. It aims to encourage the NBC television program Meet the Press to incorporate a formal fact-checking procedure for all statements made on air by its guests. That analysis would then be released to the public, preferably within several days of the broadcast. Since the Meet the Press didn't institute the system, Meet the Facts started with their own fact-checking statements made on the show as well as using crowd-sourcing for research in later shows. This effort started in 2010 and was coordinated by a political science student in Kansas (Paul Breer) and a journalism student in NYC (Chas Danner) who invested $20 for domain names and met via Facebook 3 three days before the site was launched. There is no activity in 2011.
  • Memetracker MemeTracker builds maps of the daily news cycle by analyzing around 900,000 news stories and blog posts per day from 1 million online sources, ranging from mass media to personal blogs. We track the quotes and phrases that appear most frequently over time across this entire spectrum. This makes it possible to see how different stories compete for news and blog coverage each day, and how certain stories persist while others fade quickly.
  • Memeorandum color coding , Andy Baio (whom I don't know but I suspect would be interested in truthicon built this tool . It works only on old versions of Firefox but codes stories for political bias of the outlet.
  • Michigan Truthsquad Michigan Truth Squad is a fact-checking project that aims to promote honesty and integrity in the political campaign season (Michigan area) in order to regain public trust in political process. Viewers are invited to submit political claims that they find dubious or incorrect, which they found in political speeches, advertisements, news release or report – and they are called Truth Squad Tips. Tips are investigated by professional journalists and if these tips expose exaggeration, misinformation or a lie, Michigan Truth Squad will call a “Foul” on the campaign and candidate. Michigen Truth Squad is a project of The Center for Michigan, formed by Phil Power, the former owner and publisher of Hometown Newspapers, in 2006. Responsible for refereeing and investigating tips are professional journalists: Rick Haglund and Susan Demas.
  • Newsbusters Newsbusters is a project of the Media Research Center (MRC), the leader in documenting, exposing and neutralizing liberal media bias. In August of 2005, with the assistance of Matthew Sheffield of Dialog New Media, the MRC launched the NewsBusters blog to provide immediate exposure of liberal media bias, insightful analysis, constructive criticism and timely corrections to news media reporting. Taking advantage of the MRC's thorough and ongoing tracking of liberal media bias, including a wealth of documentation and an archive of broadcast and cable news recordings dating back to 1987, NewsBusters plays a leading role in blog media criticism as a clearinghouse for evidence of liberal media bias. It combines this formidable archive and its compilers inside the MRC with the contributions of already-established netizen watchdogs.
  • Plagiarism Plagiarism is the world's leading provider of web-based solutions for plagiarism prevention founded in 1996. With the main mission to help people all over the world prevent plagiarism and restore integrity to written work. Plagarism.org became one of the Internet's predominant anti-plagiarism resources for educators and students alike, spreading over the years and developing similar projects: Ithenticate for publishers and researchers, Writecheck for students and Turnitin for educators. Turnitin is used by educators worldwide to check students' papers for originality, to enable web-based peer review and for digital grading of student work. iThenticate solution is the leader in plagiarism detection in research, publishing and many other commercial markets. WriteCheck allows students to check their work for originality and Turnitin for Admissions helps admissions officers make more informed decisions. These solutions check millions of documents each month and are used in over 100 countries. Organization behind the project is iParadigms LLC which was founded in 1996, when a group of researchers at UC Berkeley created software to monitor the recycling of research papers in their large, undergraduate classes. Encouraged by a high level of interest from their peers, they assembled a team of teachers, mathematicians, and computer scientists to form Plagiarism.org, the world's first internet-based plagiarism detection service. iParadigms is headquartered in Oakland, CA with an international office located in Newcastle, United Kingdom. iParadigms is backed by investment company Warburg Pincus. It operates as commercial business project and services are payed by individuals, academic institutions and publishers.
  • Poligraft Poligraft is a website and utility that creates an enhanced view of the people, organizations and relationships described within political news stories, blog posts and press releases. After feeding in a new article or blog post, Poligraft presents enhanced view of the interconnections between the people, organizations and relationships described in the piece. In this way, Poligraft provides much needed additional context in the contemporary information overload. Poligraft aims at making research easier through providing obvious political trends surrounding information. Data that Poligraft uses are provided by the Centre for Responsive Politics and the National Institute for Money in State Politics Poligraft is built on the public Transparency Data API. Poligraft started in 2010 as a project of Sunlight Labs, the technology arm of Sunlight Foundation. Founded in 2006, the Sunlight Foundation is a non-partisan non-profit that uses cutting-edge technology and ideas to catalyze greater government openness and transparency, and provides new tools and resources for media and citizens, alike. PoliGraph-Minnesota Public Radio News,
  • Poligraph Poligraph is a fact-cheking feature on MPR web site but also available as podcast, that gets behind the spin in politics, telling who's citing verifiable, contextual data and who's not. Each week, PoliGraph takes an in-depth look at political claims made by members of all three parties and checks them against neutral sources for accuracy. Techniques used are: reporting, research from primary sources, interviews with subject experts and independent, non-partisan analysis. Findings are presented in short, clear explanations accompanied with a rating -- accurate, misleading, false or inconclusive. Catharine Richert writes PoliGraph. She is an experienced journalist who previously worked at PolitiFact.com and Congressional Quarterly. Mike Mulcahy, MPR News' political editor, directs the feature.
  • Politifact PolitiFact is a project of the St. Petersburg Times and and its partners with the aim of finding truth in politics. Every day, reporters and researchers at from PolitiFact and its partner news organization examine statements by members of Congress, state legislators, governors, mayors, the president, cabinet secretaries, lobbyists, people who testify before Congress and others in American politics. Statements are researched and than rated for the accuracy on Truth-O-Meter. Politifact publishes on its website original statements along with their evaluations and ratings. Politifact also tracks campaign promises of President Obama, congressional Republicans and many governors and mayors using promise meters such as the Obameter and the GOP Pledge-O-Meter. For each meter, Politifact has collected a database of promises made by the officials during the campaign. Politifact writers and editors spend considerable time researching and discussing possible ratings. This includes researching original statement in its full context, original sources, government reports, speech transcripts, TV appearances, campaign web sites. PolitiFact.com was started in August 2007 by Times Washington Bureau Chief Bill Adair who remains PolitiFact's editor. It is operated by the St. Petersburg Times. In January 2010, PolitiFact.com expanded to its second newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman; the feature is called Politifact Texas and covers issues that are relevant to Texas and the Austin area. In March 2010, the Times and its partner newspaper, The Miami Herald, launched Politifact Florida, which focuses on Florida issues. Since then, PolitiFact.com expanded to other local papers.
  • PR Watch PRWatch was a quarterly print news periodical from 1993 through 2009, when it migrated to a fully online publication with a biweekly electronic edition. Writers and researchers at CMD focus on investigating and exposing deceptive PR campaigns and spin by corporations, industries, and government agencies. In this way, they promote informed decision-making about policies and products affecting public and individual lives. Organization behind the project is The Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) which describes itself as non-profit investigative reporting group whose focuses on exposing corporate spin and government propaganda. CMD published PRWatch, SourceWatch, and BanksterUSA. PR Watch particularly covers US environmental issues, but also covers topics ranging from labor rights to world affairs. Prominent cases include: reporting on the Wisconsin protests against efforts to destroy public bargaining, tobacco issues, and misinformation about U.S. surveillance practices and national security policies. In addition to archives of the newsletter, the PR Watch web site also offers daily reporting on public relations, propaganda and mass media spin in its Spin of the Day section. The Center was founded in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1993 by John Stauber who led CMD until his retirement in 2009. CMD today is led by Lisa Graves who formerly served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General at the U.S. Department of Justice.
  • Public Insight Network – MPR News The Public Insight Network is a database of journalistic sources that are made available to newsrooms for engagement and as sources.
  • Reddit Reddit is a source for what's new and popular on the web. It is a social news website where the registered users submit content in the form of either a link or a text "self" post. Other users then vote the submission "up" or "down," which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the site's pages and front page. On June 18, 2008, Reddit became an open source project. Reddit was originally founded by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. It was acquired by Conde Nast Publications in October 2006. In September 2011, Reddit was split from Condé Nast, and now operates as a subsidiary of Condé Nast's parent company, Advance Publications.
  • Regret the Error Regret the Error is fact-checking web-site that reports on media corrections, retractions, apologies, clarification and trends regarding accuracy and honesty in press. Its aim is to provide a non-partisan resource to serve press and the public and to help make news reporting more accurate and transparent. It was launched in October 2004 by Craig Silverman, a freelance journalist and author, based in Montreal. Silverman writes a weekly column about accuracy and errors for Columbia Journalism Review, and serves as managing editor for PBS MediaShift. Silverman is the author of “Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech” which is inspired by the work on web site.
  • Shift Space ShiftSpace is an open source browser plugin for collaboratively annotating, editing and shifting the web. ShiftSpace is an open source layer above any website. It provides tools for artists, designers, architects, activists, developers, students, researchers, and hobbyists to create online contexts built in and on top of websites. In Public Square viewers can find browse all the shifts, trails and activity created by the ShiftSpace community. Broader aim of this project is to subvert trend of growing privatization and commercialization on Internet by providing a new public space on the web. By pressing the [shift] + [space] keys, a ShiftSpace user can invoke a new meta layer above any web page to browse and create additional interpretations, contextualization and interventions – called Shifts. Users can choose between several authoring tools - called Spaces. Users will be invited to map these shifts into Trails. These trails can be used for collaborative research, curating netart exhibitions or as platforms for context-based public debates. ShiftSpace is produced with the support of Eyebeam Art and Technology Center in NY and supported through a grant by the Swiss Confederation and by a Rhizome.org. In 2006 it received a PrixArs honorary mention from the Ars Electronica Center. Swiftriver SwiftRiver is a platform that helps people make sense of a lot of information in a short amount of time. In practice, SwiftRiver enables the filtering and verification of real-time data from channels like Twitter, SMS, Email and RSS feeds.
  • Truth Goggles: A student at MIT’s Media Lab, Dan Schultz, is developing a browser plug-in that can check the accuracy of information posted online, and may use it to monitor political speeches for untruths. Schultz is building what he calls truth goggles —software that flags suspicious claims in news articles and helps readers determine their truthiness. Schultz’s software is not designed to determine lies from truth on its own. That remains primarily the province of people who will be encouraged with this software to think critically about what they are reading. The software is being designed to detect words and phrases that show up in PolitiFact’s database, relying on PolitiFact’s researchers for the truth-telling. Truth Goggles software is set to be released in 2012.
  • Truthsquad Truthsquad is a community fact-checking experiment led by NewsTrust in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity. Main aim of the project is to form a network consisted of readers/amateurs and professional investigative journalists to fact check political claims during the 2012 elections as well as to extend this pilot project into a daily service by early 2012. Truthsquad combines traditional newsroom and moderated crowd-sourcing service which engages readers to verify controversial claims. Editors pick up dubious claims made not only by politicians, but also by reporters and commentators; readers can review related evidence material and than decide if the statement is true or false. First pilot was launched in the week of August 2nd 2010. Organization behind the project is NewsTrust in partnership with the Centre for Public Integrity but also in broad cooperation with similar initiatives, such are: Poynter Institute, FactCheck.org, MediaBugs.org and RegretTheError.com. NewsTrust Communications is a 501(c)(3) California public benefit organization
  • Truthy Truthy is a system to analyze and visualize the diffusion of information on Twitter in order to detect fake political representation, follow political activity or measure public sentiment. The Truthy system uses data mining and network analysis to evaluate thousands of tweets an hour and to identify new and emerging bursts of activity around memes of various flavors. Truthy offers evidence that political campaigns and special-interest groups are using scores of fake Twitter accounts to create the impression of broad grass-roots political expression. The Truthy system uses 'truthy' (a term coined by Stephen Colbert) to refer to activities such as political smear campaigns, astroturfing, and other social pollution. Users can flag injections of forged grass-roots activity or when they see suspicious meme. Researchers at Indiana University Center for Complex Networks & Systems Research launched Truthy last year by spotting political astroturf during the 2010 mid-term elections. Truthy has 18 people in research team but relays also on users.
  • WikiFactCheck Wiki Fact Check was initiated in 2010. by Andrew Lih, with the aim of crowd-sourced fact checking of news events and verification of factual data. The project builds on Wikipedia's collaborative culture of maintaining a neutral point of view and using verifiable information from reliable sources to provide an augmented news platform through annotation, correlation and visualization. Initial targets include: political speeches and debates, corporate press conferences, election campaign advertisements, credentials, CVs and matters of historical record, TV talk shows. Strengths of the project are defined as: political neutrality, breadth of coverage (Wikipedia crowd), timeliness (already existing in Wikipedia entries) and evolvability.
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