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Is the future of fact-checking automated? [1]

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Date: 2022-07-14 10:30:47+00:00

Ten years ago, the concept of real-time fact-checking may have been a pipe dream. The process takes time and effort, from identifying claims from hours of broadcasts, cross-referencing them with available data and interviewing experts to establish facts.

But very soon, live fact checks may flash in chyrons under the faces of politicians and pundits debating on TV, all carried out with minimal human input.

The United Kingdom-based fact-checking organization, Full Fact, has been implementing forms of automated fact-checking since 2013. The outlet currently uses an alpha version of three automated tools that work in tandem to detect and categorize claims real time, cross reference them with existing fact checks and even display relevant figures for statistical claims to aid fact-checkers in rapidly assessing their veracity. While the tool is mostly internal for now, Full Fact is collaborating with other fact-checking organizations to expand its use across languages, regions and cultures.

“Our intention is to really take these tools to as many users as possible, and especially take them to language users who have historically been underserved in automated fact-checking because of the difficulties that are associated with multilingual tools,” said Kate Wilkinson, senior product manager at Full Fact.

The first tool deals with claim detection. Users select a channel, whether it’s BBC News or a number of others, and can watch a live transcription of whatever’s being broadcasted. As soon as a sentence appears which contains a claim — verifiable or not — the tool recognizes and labels it as belonging to one or multiple categories: quantity, support, rules, correlation, personal (someone doing or believing something), predictions and voting.

“The problem we’re trying to solve is that we want to make it as easy as possible for fact-checkers to identify the most important things to fact check on any given day,” Wilkinson said.

The second tool addresses the problem of how to increase the reach of existing fact checks. This tool cross-references claims identified from the claim detection tool with existing fact checks done by Full Fact. Here’s an example from last week of the tool in action; it instantly alerted fact-checkers when U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson repeated a false claim.

“Anyone who is involved in fact-checking knows that a fact check can take 15 minutes or it could take two weeks depending on how easy it is to find the data that you need,” Wilkinson said. “But once all of that effort and work has been invested, the outcome is one fact check. And unfortunately, just publishing one fact check seldom ever kills a false statement.”

Wilkinson compared false statements in information ecosystems to weeds in a garden.

“If you go out into your garden and you’re doing some gardening and you pull out the big weed, that’s not going to stop weeds growing in your garden,” she said. “The moment the next weed pops up, you need to pull it out and pull it out and pull it out until slowly over time the weed no longer comes back.”

The third tool, stats-checker, enables fact-checkers to rapidly cross reference live claims about statistics with official available statistics. For now, this tool is limited to statistics surrounding inflation and unemployment.

“We know there are certain topics of debate, specifically around statistics, where we could dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to verify a statistical claim,” Wilkinson said. “If you used our tool to monitor statements during a live address, it would identify and show you all the statements that could be factored, it would tell you if any of those statements have been fact-checked before and have been found to be false. And if there was a statistical claim on unemployment or inflation, it would tell you if that claim was correct or incorrect.”

In recent years, with financial backing from Google.org, Full Fact has investigated how artificial intelligence could help tackle false information and made a concerted effort to scale its tools for multilingual, global use.

“A lot of the tools that have been built have been built with one context, social setting, environment or culture in mind,” Wilkinson said. “But what we’re trying to achieve in this project is to serve a global audience.”

Wilkinson said the tools will soon be available to fact-checking organizations around the world and are currently under trial with the office of statistical regulation in the U.K. (It’s using the tool to be alerted when official statistics are being misused.)

The fact-checking outlets Chequeado, in Argentina, and Africa Check, headquartered in South Africa, are implementing versions of the same technology.

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[1] Url: https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2022/is-the-future-of-fact-checking-automated/

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