By Mehmet Atakan Foça
The writers and editors at teyit.org investigate tens of claims and suspicious news every day that appear on news websites and social media. Although a large part of the suspicious news content get detected even before they spread thanks to teyit.org followers, it is nevertheless time consuming to investigate the claims and reach out to trustworthy sources.
In this workflow article, we would like to share our 4 -step verification process with you.
1. Scan
We start by scanning suspicious news, and luckily for us, our followers are of great help when it comes to scanning. Users who doubt the accuracy of the content they come across on social media notify teyit.org over Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp or e-mail. On average, we receive 124 messages and 24 unique suspicious news contents per day (Since March 2018).
Aside from the tips we receive on social media and Whatsapp, our editors scan the Internet and collect the news articles they deem suspicious.
At this initial step, all of the collected news articles are stored on an administrative panel, which we call dubito, that helps us view and manage the claims in one single page.
2. Prioritize
We employ three criteria to prioritize and select among the claims stored in the panel.
The rationale behind prioritization is that fact-checking process entirely depends on human labor. We believe that if and when we make optimal use of our time by prioritizing, we can investigate more claims.
First, we check if the content can be verified based on factual data and concrete evidence. For instance, claims that include comments, suppositions, prescience, or claims that took place back in an unverifiable date are likely to be eliminated at this step. If the claim is not verifiable, the case is removed from the panel indefinitely.
Then, we prioritize verifiable claims based on their prevalence and importance. The most prevalent and important claims, therefore, get the first place. The prevalence is measured by of the claim’s popularity on social media, its interaction rate or its appearance on a news website. The importance of a claim gets the determinative role when it has the potential to target an individual or to increase societal polarization and discrimination. If the claim is not prevalent or important, it gets stored in a database set for non-prioritized content.
If the claim meets our criteria, an examiner gets assigned and begins investigating. It should be noted that this process only takes place when there are no emergencies or unexpected developments. Whereas in case of an emotionally charged crisis, we also consider emergency as a criterion, which becomes decisive especially in situations that needs urgent verification regardless of its prevalence on social media platforms (i.e. volunteer, blood search or missing person announcements).
Then, the identified content get distributed among our writers and editors, and the investigation begins.
3. Research & Analysis
At least two pieces of evidence need to be found about the claim before moving on to the analysis phase. The evidences should either prove or disprove the claim and should be available to all users.
The analysis includes all the evidence that was discovered during research, which provides our readers easy access to facts, and ensure that they could follow the fact-checking process and identify any mistakes or shortcomings throughout the article.
If it turns out that evidences were incorrect, conflicting, or that sources were untrustworthy, then the analysis gets removed, never to be published.
4. Impact Tracking
Once the analysis is published and reaches the public eye through social media platforms, we start tracking the social media accounts and news websites who shared the false information in the first place. During this period, accounts and websites that remove or correct their content are announced under the headline “teyit track”.
We believe that highlighting a correction is as important as pointing out the false information. This way, we put forward those who take the initiative to prevent false information from spreading. Moreover, highlighting the corrections make it easier for us to see the success rate of our analysis and efforts.
Mehmet Atakan Foça is editor-in-chief of verification platform teyit.org.
Translation: Beril Bulat
