Checking Facts

The Web and social media produce massive amounts of data at different levels of quality and trustworthiness. New research focuses on creating methods for checking whether facts published online are correct.

• Verly is a platform for verifying information published on social media. People manually collect and analyze evidence to confirm or rebuke reports. Reputation scores help assessing the accuracy of messages, people, sources, and validators.
• Storyful combines manual and automated means for fact-checking information. It checks the veracity based on clues like weather reports (time), the angle of the sun (time), and visual landmarks (geography).
• Ushahidi (Inc), offers products for 'activist mapping' - i.e. that enable local observers to submit reports using their mobile phones or the internet and annotates these reports with geographic, temporal and topical meta-data. The platform aims at letting organizations manage and make sense of massive amounts of social media reports.
• Swift River (App) has been developed by Ushahidi and provides means for filtering social media messages from sources such as Twitter, RSS, and SMS messages. Users rate content, sources, and messages as correct or incorrect yielding information for pre-processing and filtering future messages.