Creating a common standard for facts on the web: Explaain and First Draft News
This month Explaain became an official Core Partner of the First Draft News network.
First Draft News is a nonprofit coalition to tackle fact-checking and verification on the web — they’re doing this through tools, training and a collaboration between journalism organisations.
Other core partners include platforms like Google, Facebook and Twitter as well as the likes of BuzzFeed, BBC News, The New York Times and many more.
Meanwhile, one of our core missions at Explaain is to become a common standard for factual news information on the web.
It’s easy to find reasons why things like these are so crucial right now. Trust in journalism is at an all-time low, and misinformation and fake news are having increasingly catastrophic consequences across the globe.
Tab-hopping syndrome
Right now it’s simply too time-consuming to expect readers to constantly verify what they read online.
That’s not just a problem with fake news. Every other sentence we read is based on evidence we’re not seeing, and it’s often near impossible to tell whether we’re being misled, denied context or shown only one side of the story.
The result is that we don’t know what to trust. At best this ends up with what we at Explaain call tab-hopping syndrome: trying to find out more about everything and ending up with two-dozen browser tabs and a sense of being a little overwhelmed.
At worst, we end up retreating into our comfort zones, believing only the things we want to believe and losing our open minds to new information and ideas.
There’s a lot of talk at the moment about filter bubbles in social media, where we become less and less aware of other sides of a debate. If we’re not careful, it won’t even matter whether we see opposing views or not — we’ll choose to ignore them anyway.
Earning trust
Explaain is committed to working towards solutions to these problems, which is why we’re so thrilled to be partnering with First Draft News.
Our card system makes it easy to interrogate articles online. You’re only ever one click away from digging deeper into an opinion, fact, quote or chart — meaning you can be confident you’re placing trust in news organisations that deserve it.
Meanwhile, First Draft News is developing techniques and indicators for establishing and displaying how trustworthy a source of information is, using the collaboration of their full network of partners.
We’re excited to find ways of working together to make these trust indicators accessible and available to anyone reading news online.
And if you’re working on these problems too then we’d love to work with you. Get in touch with us here — and help rebuild the trust in journalism that today’s world urgently needs.
