What are the best fact-checking tools to protect your organization?
The threat of misinformation and fake news for individuals and organizations has been well-documented. But what about existing tools that can help you prevent and counter it? There are actually a ton of go-to fact-checking websites and solutions. Here’s a curated list.
Why use a fact-checking tool against fake news?
Fake news and unverified claims are sowing much confusion in social media and within organizations. In fact, 86 percent of users have already reported being duped by dubious affirmations spread online.
As serious as the situation might seem, there already exist some weapons to counter information disorders. Fact-checking tools are one among them. By detecting, debunking, and marking suspicious claims, they help you navigate through the daily flow of recommended content and news. They are also valuable weapons to proactively detect and prevent the threat of false information within organizations.
Thanks to fact-checking, you can make sure to :
- Make reliable decisions on verified information and data.
- Train yourself and your employee at critical thinking to better spot false claims.
- Prevent disinformation attacks against your brand or company.
- Augment your IT system with fake news detection, flagging, and moderation features.
Ready to get started? Here's our list of the best:
Best Fact-Checking media websites to prevent misinformation
Let’s start with fact-checking websites that are debunking real-time news and facts online. These are often media outlets or independent organizations that specifically aim to fight against misinformation. By checking them out and subscribing to them, you can stay updated about the latest false affirmations and hoaxes.
Among the most reliable and reactive, these include :
AFP
AFP (Agence France-Press) is one of the leading media organizations fighting against misinformation. Originally a trusted news agency in French, it launched a digital verification service in 2017 that has since grown over the world. Now, it relies on bureaus of journalists located in more than 100 countries to debunk local fake news. It also provides customized RSS feeds to integrate into companies’ information systems. There’s nothing like it for global fact-checking.
FactCheck.org
Factcheck.org is the first media organization that has aimed to provide truthful and factual political US news. Founded by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, it’s one of the most trusted fact-checking websites with high verification and investigation standards. It has a team of experienced journalists and researchers who fact-check every political claim made by politicians, advocacy groups, and the media. You should definitely go there to get accurate and unbiased coverage of US elections and policies.
Leadstories.com
Leadstories is one of the most reactive fact-checking websites when it comes to reviewing and verifying news online. They rely on big data technologies to spot trending topics on social media and blogs and analyze their claim. So even though it is US-based, it also covers a lot of news around the globe.
Africa Check
Africa Check is the go-to source when it comes to African-related news. With more than 40 journalists over the continent, it aims at debunking and clarifying policy-related claims about health, the economy, education, and electoral politics. It especially fights against public claims made by political figures and organizations. So it’s a valuable website to have a clear and accurate view of African societies and economies.
Fact-checker by country :
In addition to these notable examples, there are also local fact-checking organizations in each country :
- Malidata Es for Spain
- Deutsche Presse-Agentur for Germany
- Fact-checker for India
- EUvsDinsfo for the EU
- Full Fact for UK
- Pagella Politica for Italy
- And more…
Top Fact-Checking online tools to review content
Besides media organizations, there’s an increasing number of tools designed to detect, review and analyze information spread online. You can rely on them to monitor content and ensure you and your organizations are safe from misinformation waves and disinformation attacks. There are 4 types of them :
News Fact-checking
Google Fact Check Explorer
Powered by Google's unlimited news database, Fact Check Explorer enables you to review any piece of content on the internet. You just have to search for particular events, organizations, or people to access every proven fake news related to them. This is the most powerful and exhaustive misinformation database you can find online.
Media Bias Fact Check
Mediabiasfactcheck is a website that rates every media organization based on bias, factual accuracy, and credibility. It looks for any false information, reporting mistakes, and biased articles to determine an overall score. By typing your news outlet of choice on the website, you can find out how objective and trustworthy it is.
The Factual
The Factual is a news app that leverages data to rate any released media articles. It assesses every piece of news based on the author's expertise, the quality of sources, and the political inclination. Thanks to this overall score, you can read your news feed while being aware of existing biases, inaccuracies, or opinions. It is a good way to grow your critical thinking and access trustworthy information.
NewsGuard
NewsGuard is probably the most known and credible website and media rating system. Its team of experienced analysts and journalists on criteria like truthfulness, source credibility, mistake accountability, and transparency. NewsGuard involves website owners in the verification processes by asking them for comments and adapts ratings to new changes. It also monitors its ratings with a team of expert editors. The NewsGuard application helps thus both media, advertisers, and healthcare workers benefit from reliable and verified information.
Social media fact-checking
Who posted what ?
Social media has become a place where everyone can express his/her opinions. This also means that you could be influenced by the opinions of complete strangers, including ill-intended news propagators and hate-spreading bots. What if you could keep track of everything someone said? That’s what the website Who posted what helps you do. You just have to type the Facebook or Twitter profile to access their past publications. That way, you’ll sure to detect spam and scam accounts.
Hoaxy
Viral Twitter posts can propagate very quickly via scattered threads and have a massive influence on people’s opinions. It seems reasonable to be able to look for prior authors and sources before trusting any tweet. Hoaxy provides you with data visualization tools to trace back any conversation and link them to the original accounts. You can also track the number of related Tweets in real time. It’s a good tool to investigate problematics claims.
Botsentinel
Bot Sentinel is a machine-learning-based app that analyzes every Twitter account and categorizes them based on suspicious behavior. With this data, you can check and prevent yourself from hateful or misleading bots. You can detect accounts posting problematic content. You can also block them from your own Twitter feed.
Video & Picture fact-checking
Tineye
Sometimes it’s pictures that are manipulated and used out of their context. Tineye helps quickly know when and where pictures have been posted online. That way, you can track back the sources of the pictures you can find on social media or blogs and check for misrepresentations.
ExifTool
ExifTool also fights against picture misinformation, but with other powerful features. It helps you access the metadata of submitted data like source, timestamp, creation, and modification information. You can even know where the picture has been shot via GPS tags. With this data in your hands, you can authenticate any online image.
InVid
InVid provides a comprehensive toolset to address video misinformation. Its verification application enables you to reverse-search videos, collect metadata and track back their editing and sharing history. You can also play videos frame-by-frame, apply advanced filters and check for dubious editing. The plugin always you to leverage these features right on your browser. A must-have for your video verification process.
Scam detection
ViewDNS
You can infer a lot of things from the domain, IP, and DNS history. This kind of data enables you to spot fake or scammy domains. ViewDNS has everything to do the job: reverse IP lookup, DNS report, server location, firewall tests, and much more. This can help you track down fraudulent IPs and related domains.
ScamSearch
With a huge scam database, ScamSearch helps you verify any website, email address, or other credentials for potential malicious activities. You can check and report any potential scammer. This is also a good way to spot social media users or domains that are spreading disinformation with ill-intended motivations.
Fact-Checking API: add fact-checking capabilities to your IT
Fact-checking tools are good weapons against misinformation, but what if you could provide these capabilities throughout your organization?
Fact-checking API enables you to augment your internal IT and communication tools with misinformation detection, flagging, and moderation features. By adding them to your tech stack, you can better counter the threat of fake news on your organization.
Buster.AI provides a fact-checking API that helps you face any information disorders. As a deep-learning-powered fact-checking app, Buster.AI can understand sentences, connect them to trusted sources, and provide you with a reliability score.
By adding Buster.AI’s API to your company IT, you can determine a matching score between post and textual content submitted by users and trusted sources or documents. These features also work with groups of text documents and rely on predefined sources.
Book a demo with Buster.AI and deploy an effective and reactive fact-checking strategy on your IT system!
