Corrections, not just fact-checking

Creating impact with fact-checking content should be deliberate in order to change reader behaviour.

First day at Full Fact. (Pic: Amy Sippitt)

By Soila Kenya

Election time is the busiest time for fact-checkers. My fact-checking work with PesaCheck led to an opportunity to be in London for two weeks in November, just before the UK’s general election on December 12.

I was there as a research fellow for the International Fact-Checking Network, to explore how to increase the impact of fact-checking. I was attached to Full Fact, a fact-checking NPO in London.

While there, I watched Full Fact run a live fact-check of the first debate between British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. At PesaCheck, I had witnessed live fact-checking before, but something unexpected happened.

The UK Conservative Party’s official press Twitter account rebranded itself to look like a fact-checking organisation. This move caught everyone off-guard.

This made it even more clear that fact-checker roles are ever-evolving — even to the extent that a political party would use it as trick mechanism. The pushback was immediate as a number of organisations called out the party and explained the deleterious effects this may have on voters.

Working in their office during a highly contested election season highlighted different approaches teams can take for fact-checking. Participating in brainstorming meetings and planning sessions meant seeing just how finely tuned the cogs in this wheel works to ensure efficiency.

A brainstorming session at Full Fact. (Pic: Soila Kenya)

Going in, I had set out a few questions to answer: what makes fact-checking work? Is PesaCheck fact-checking effectively? What could be done to increase the impact of PesaCheck’s work?

That’s a pretty broad scope and I decided to narrow it down to specific pre- and post-publication actions a fact-checker should take note of as they begin to think about impact.

What should you do pre-publication?

1. Consider putting the fact-checked claim in the headline rather than a question. For example, rather than saying ‘Are 68% of Ugandans engaged in subsistence farming?’, it should read ‘68% of Ugandans are not engaged in subsistence farming.’
2. Simpler is better — make the information easy to comprehend.
3. Add a reader satisfaction question at the end of fact-checks to gauge whether readers understand the content.
4. Have editorial meetings ahead of major events to prepare and equip each fact-checker to ensure a fast turnover rate for articles — especially during live fact-checks.
5. Create Twitter lists to target specific organisations during amplification.

What about post-publication?

1. Request corrections from news organisations when they have published errors or miss out on context.
2. Set measurable targets for impact: how many shares on social media or number of website page views.
3. Ask statistics organisations for clarifications when they publish misunderstood data.
4. Conduct periodic user surveys to gauge the overall impact of the content.

The main lesson I learnt? Corrections — not only fact-checking. The goal is to teach and change audience behaviour, which can only be achieved by deliberately planning out impact.

Soila Kenya is a data journalist at Code for Africa.

Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest federation of indigenous civic technology and open data laboratories with CfA labs in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda and a further five affiliate labs in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Morocco and Sierra Leone and funded projects in a further 12 countries. CfA manages the $1m/year innovateAFRICA.fund and $500,000/year impactAFRICA.fund, as well as key digital democracy resources such as the openAFRICA.net data portal and the GotToVote.cc election toolkit. CfA primarily supports grassroots citizen organisations and the media to help liberate data and empower citizens, but also works with progressive government agencies to improve digital service delivery.

In addition to funding and technology support, CfA’s labs incubate a series of trendsetting initiatives including the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative in East Africa, the continental africanDRONE network, and the African Network of Centres for Investigative Reporting (ANCIR) that spearheaded Panama Papers probes across the continent.