First Draft-Full Fact Project Wraps; Misinformation in Europe & APAC
Hello Everyone,
We hope your summer is off to a good start! Spring wrapped for us with the UK election fact checking and verification project with Full Fact.
We monitored online conversations related to the election and provided newsrooms with a twice-daily newsletter that included the main themes being discussed online and identified inaccurate content, rumours and claims being shared.
We sent 33 newsletters over the three and a half weeks leading up to polling day. These newsletters offer a treasure trove of information as we start the post-mortem on this election project.
Two immediate takeaways from the project:
- Factcheckers and verification specialists need to work together much more closely.
- Factcheckers should be monitoring online conversations in real-time as well as official sources.
We’ve written four posts so far about our initial learnings:
- UK election first post: what we learned working with Full Fact: Why we think fact-checkers and verification specialists should start working together.
- How we fact-checked the UK Election in real time: Our blueprint for journalists on responding to newsworthy conversations and stemming the flow of misinformation
- The types of misinformation we saw during the UK election: Monitoring online conversations revealed a serious problem with the sharing of misleading campaign information
- Reporting on a new age of digital astroturfing: Proper analyses of bot networks demand skills and thinking that are totally new to social scientists and journalists
First Draft Welcomes Nic
The last article in the previous collection is written by Nic Dias, our new recruit. He is a computational journalist who recently graduated from Columbia Journalism School and first became involved with First Draft as a member of the Electionland team last Fall.You’ll start to see his byline on the website and elsewhere as he keeps an eye on the latest tools and techniques for effectively monitoring the disinformation ecosystem and verifying the content that emerges. He’ll work closely with us on our research projects, too. Welcome, Nic!
Misinformation in Europe
First Draft is holding public discussions in Strasbourg on July 3 about disinformation trends and patterns in Europe.
Storyful’s Padraic Ryan will present practical skills for monitoring disinformation, and Nicolas Vanderbiest and Alexandre Alaphilippe of reputatolab.com will show how they see the mapping of sources of disinformation as crucial to disrupting the disinformation ecosystem.
Our CrossCheck France partners from AFP, Le Monde, Les Echos and Rue89 Strasbourg will discuss our first collaborative verification newsroom, and First Draft and Full Fact leaders will recap the UK Election Project.
We are guests of the Council of Europe.
Misinformation in APAC
We were in Hong Kong and Seoul at the end of March and met with journalists and students who are doing excellent work in the space of verification and understand the region’s media landscape.
Samantha Stanley, a master’s student of journalism at Hong Kong University, writes about misinformation and hate speech in Myanmar. The country went from limited news to smartphones almost overnight, so for its citizens, Facebook is where they read the news, and misinformation has inspired a two-day riot.
Sophia Xu, Duty Editor and Asia Partnerships Manager at Storyful in Hong Kong, writes about Chinese social networks and their impact on journalism. Live video is all the rage in China, and closed-network messaging apps allow users to chat with friends and pay bills.
Three Must-Use Guides
- Bellingcat’s Digital Forensics Tools: First Draft Founding Partner reveals its verification and investigation tools, resources and methods in this open-source Google Doc.
- The Intercept’s Surveillance Self-Defense Checklist: maximize security with recommendations grouped by difficulty.
- The Listening Post Collective: resources, tools, peer-to-peer support and a shared learning space for journalists, newsroom leaders and community groups that want to revitalize local news and information ecosystems.
We kicked off #DisinfoWeek on Monday as a supporting partner in the Digital Disinformation Forum in Stanford University. Follow our take-away Tweets.
We will have a First Draft trainer at the Google News Lab Summit in Singapore. Drop us a line if you’ll be attending and we’ll connect you!
All the best,
The First Draft Team
