CheckBot brings Fact-Checking and Verification to Slack

Written by Wafaa Heikal and Tom Trewinnard

Slack is changing the way many newsrooms work: in addition to being a great way to share cat GIFs with colleagues, journalists use Slack to research, edit and publish their stories. Slack is also powering large-scale journalistic collaborations, many of which Check has also supported, like Electionland, CrossCheck and Documenting Hate.

As we develop Check, our platform for collaborative verification, we’re keen to integrate closely with Slack and are happy to announce some new ways Check and Slack can provide a powerful and flexible stack for collaborating around fact-checking, verification and social newsgathering.

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New feature: CheckBot

Slack is a great place for quick and productive collaboration — a chat with a colleague that might shed new light on a photo you’re verifying. Finding that chat after the fact, however, is less straightforward — particularly for larger teams handling lots of content.

Our new feature — CheckBot — brings Check’s structured approach directly into Slack, letting journalists quickly add notes, change a status and reverse image search from within the Slack interface.

We’re planning to introduce additional functionality to CheckBot very soon, and look forward to hearing your feedback on this new feature!

Check Notifications in Slack

Since launching in November 2016, Check users have been able to link their Check and Slack teams to receive notifications:

‘For nearly every action taken on Check, whether that’s adding a report, adding a note or changing a verification status, our friendly [notifications] bot automatically pings Slack. As this is where the Electionland team is having their live conversations, the [notifications] bot can help them keep up with what’s happening on Check in near real time.’ Checking the Vote: How Check Was Used During Electionland — An Xiao Mina, Director of Product

Sign in with Slack

You’ve always been able to create an account on Check (and sign in) with Slack, but did you know that you can also configure Check so that any full members of your team on Slack are automatically able to contribute to work on Check? Invite a new collaborator or team member to your Slack, and they’ll be able to dive in right away to contribute to the checking.

Internally, Meedan has been using Slack since early 2014 — we switched as a one-day trial and never looked back. Meedan’s product, design and development teams are spread over four continents, and by integrating GitHub, Asana, Mantis, Jenkins and HuBot our product, development and programs teams have clear, real-time visibility into how work is proceeding.

Want to try out Check? Sign up now for a free trial!