Check arrives in East Africa!
Meedan and PesaCheck are excited to launch our new partnership, working together to support fact checking in East Africa. PesaCheck is integrating Meedan’s open source Check toolkit in their work verifying statements of public figures across the countries where they’re operating: Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. The cooperation comes through support from innovateAFRICA.
Our partnership aims to provide a technology-supported structure to fact checking and verification efforts in East Africa, with the goal of limiting the spread and impact of misinformation online and supporting access to accurate information and news.
Following kickoff discussions between Meedan and PesaCheck teams in which we outlined and detailed how Check could support fact checking and verification needs, recent weeks have seen intensive demo and practice sessions with PesaCheck’ affiliates and team members to get them introduced and ready to use the tool in their own fact checking efforts. PesaCheck case is an ideal use-case for Check, where multiple teams across different newsrooms are collaborating on verification stories and fact checking. This builds on the high impact (and award-nominated!) work of Check-based projects such as Electionland, CrossCheck, Documenting Hate and #GE2017.
On using Check, Eric Mugendi, Managing Editor of PesaCheck explains the benefits of including the tool in their work:
“Keeping track of three teams in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, each working on their own individual verification tasks has its own challenges. As the PesaCheck Managing Editor, I need keep track of the stories they are working on as well as their progress from identifying the claims to categorizing them as true or false.
The standardized format on Check means that I can keep track of what everyone is working on. The biggest benefit of using Check is how easy we can integrate it into our apps and processes.
We have integrated Check into our teams’ Slack channels, so I get a notification every time a claim is added or updated. Additionally, we can embed the facts that have been checked into the stories that we publish, so that our audiences can also be involved in the fact-checking process.”
At present, three teams are working on Check on separate verification projects for each country. The teams are being configured by Meedan according to each team’s needs and requirements, to better serve their verification work. With the pilot currently taking place, PesaCheck’s affiliates and team members are gearing up for some serious fact checking with the help of Check.
If you’re a journalist and want to try out Check as a way to streamline and coordinate your social newsgathering, fact checking and verification workflows, request early access to Check here.
