Here’s an easy prediction: 2018 will bring mounting pressure to develop large-scale, automated responses to online misinformation. And here’s a hopeful one: That pressure will spark an increasingly frank discussion among journalists, policymakers, and platform companies about how to bolster the fact-building institutions that anchor public truth claims.
The quest to automate online fact-checking began well before the furor over so-called “fake news.” Fact-checks have a consistent structure built around discrete data elements — a claim, a claimant, a verdict — that lends itself to marrying human and machine intelligence in interesting ways. One of the first attempts to do this was Truth Goggles, an MIT project that (as initially conceived in 2011) tried to harness the work of professional fact-checkers to build a “magical button” that would instantly flag false claims on any web page.
Since then, fact-checkers and computer scientists have worked together on a string of projects that aim to automate different part of the fact-checking process. One thing these efforts have in common is using automation as an enhancement, rather than a replacement, for journalistic work — as what Bill Adair, writing in these pages past year, called a “force multiplier” to help human fact-checkers keep up with a growing tide of online misinformation.
For example, the most tedious part of a fact-checker’s job is hunting for interesting and important claims to check; a lot of what politicians say in speeches and debates turns out to be vague rhetoric or statements of opinion. ClaimBuster, developed by computer scientists at the University of Texas at Arlington, pores over transcripts to identify and rank factual statements that fact-checkers might want to investigate. (It also retweets checkable claims here.)
Another promising tool, being developed by the U.K.-based Full Fact, scans media feeds to track which politicians and news outlets are repeating claims that have already been debunked. Called Trends, the project is designed to give the fact-checkers a strategic view of the misinformation landscape, so they can target their corrections more effectively. Political journalists will also be able to use it to guide their reporting.
The most powerful automation technology deployed so far is in some ways the simplest: Since 2016, growing numbers of fact-checkers around the world have been using a new tagging scheme, called ClaimReview, that makes their work legible to algorithms. This means that when Google recognizes the claim being searched for — try “the Russia investigation is a made-up story” — it can preview the verdict in a “snippet” at the top of the search results. (The same tagging system lets the Amazon Echo look up answers to factual queries.)
The research involved in efforts like these has started to bring into view the “holy grail” of an end-to-end fact-checking engine that can check at least some kinds of claims in real time. ClaimBuster and Full Fact have trials in the works (see videos here and here) which operate by matching new claims against fact-checkers’ databases — or, in certain cases, by consulting original data sources such as economic statistics or voting records. As Full Fact noted in a 2016 report, the key to these efforts “is to make sure the kinds of resources fact-checkers can rely on are available as structured data that computers can use.”
And that’s what’s most exciting about these initiatives: Designing the systems to automate verification will draw focus back to the public, institutionally sanctioned data sources that human fact-checkers depend on to certify facts about everything from hurricane strength to inflation rates. These include agencies at every level of government — the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics is an ideal-typical example — as well as countless scientific and civil institutions that set standards and produce benchmark data in different areas of research or policy.
Political fact-checkers couldn’t do what they do without these kinds of institutional resources. Of course, neither could Google’s search algorithms, which depend both directly and indirectly on institutional authority reflected in our patterns of clicking and linking online. In fact, professional fact-checking groups act as a kind of social engine — one of many — for translating institutional knowledge into data that computers can work with.
Reflections on the rise of “algorithmic authority” have tended to oppose it to the institutional kind, based on old-world mechanisms like formal credentialing and peer review. The push for “automated” fact-checking may help us to come to terms with a reality that has always been messier than that, making explicit the institutional subsidy that algorithmic intelligence depends on.
Lucas Graves is senior research fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Miguel Castro The arrival of the impact producer
Alan Soon The rise of start of psychographic, micro-targeted media
Jacqui Cheng Retailers move into content
Mariana Moura Santos Think local, act global
Renée Kaplan The year of quiet adjustments (shhh)
Michelle Ferrier The year of the great reckoning
Juleyka Lantigua Women of color will reclaim and monetize our time
Ruth Palmer Risks will grow for news subjects — especially minorities
Matt Thompson Here come the attention managers
Nicholas Quah Stop talking trash about young people
Dan Shanoff You down with OTT? (Yeah, DTC)
Mariano Blejman News games rule
Borja Echevarría TV goes digital, digital goes TV
Joyce Barnathan It will be harder to bury the news
Heather Bryant Building the ecosystems for collaboration
Rachel Schallom Better design helps differentiate opinion and news
Mary Walter-Brown Show a little vulnerability
Yvonne Leow The rise of video messaging
Laura E. Davis Writing answers before you know the question
Francesco Marconi The year of machine-to-machine journalism
Valérie Bélair-Gagnon Seeking trust in fragmented spaces
Monique Judge Letting black women tell their own stories
Molly de Aguiar Good journalism won’t be enough
Andrew Ramsammy The year ownership mattered
Alexios Mantzarlis Moving fake news research out of the lab
Tanya Cordrey Finally, the seeds of radical reinvention
Rodney Benson Better, less read, and less trusted
Mandy Velez texting is lit rn, fam
Errin Haines At the ballot, it’s time to count black women
Sam Sanders Shine the light on ourselves
Andrew Losowsky The year of resilience
Jarrod Dicker Honesty in advertising
Alfred Hermida Going beyond mobile-first
Hossein Derakhshan Television has won
Tracie Powell The muting of underserved voices
Claire Wardle Disinformation gets worse
C.W. Anderson The social media apocalypse
Richard Tofel The platforms’ power demands more reporters’ attention
Julia Beizer A longer view on the pivot
Ray Soto VR reaches the next level
Nikki Usher The year of The Washington Post
Amy Webb Listen to weak signals
Rick Berke Value is the watchword
Kawandeep Virdee Zines had it right all along
Amy King Let’s amplify visual voice
Mi-Ai Parrish Blockchain and trust
Jim Brady With the people, not just of the people
Matt Boggie The intellectual equivalent of the Dead Sea
Kathleen McElroy Building a news video experience native to mobile
Carlos Martínez de la Serna The new journalism commons
Jassim Ahmad Thriving on change
Julia B. Chan Looking for loyalty in all the right places
Emma Carew Grovum Newsroom culture becomes a priority
Kim Fox Audience teams diversify their approach
Pete Brown Push alerts, personalized
Daniel Trielli The rich get richer, the poor scramble
Sydette Harry Listen to your corner and watch for the hook
Niketa Patel Live journalism comes of age
Kristen Muller The year of the voter
Eric Nuzum Beyond the narrative arc
Federica Cherubini The rise of bridge roles in news organizations
Matt DeRienzo A recession, then a collapse
Raju Narisetti Mirror, mirror on the wall
Sally Lehrman Trust comes first
Mira Lowe The year of the local watchdog
Jennifer Brandel and Mónica Guzmán The editorial meeting of the future
Sara M. Watson Feeds will open up to new user-determined filters
Debra Adams Simmons And a woman shall lead them
Lucas Graves From algorithms to institutions
Umbreen Bhatti The trust problem isn’t new
Carrie Brown-Smith Transparency finally takes off
P. Kim Bui The reckoning is only beginning
Pablo Boczkowski The rise of skeptical reading
Bill Keller A growing turn to philanthropy
Christopher Meighan Passive partnership is in the rearview
Lanre Akinola Making noise is not a strategy
Imaeyen Ibanga Longform video leads the way
Doris Truong Computer vision vs. the Internet vigilantes
Hannah Cassius The year of the echo-chamber escapists
Jennifer Coogan The future is female
Mike Caulfield Refactoring media literacy for the networked age
Jared Newman Venture funding and digital news don’t mix
Eric Ulken The year local publishers get smart(er) about change
Elizabeth Jensen Show your work
Jennifer Choi Standing up for us and for each other
Caitria O'Neill The new court of public opinion
Aron Pilhofer We can’t leave the business to the business side any more
Alastair Coote The year of self-improvement
Dannagal G. Young Stop covering politics as a game
Joanne McNeil Gatekeeping the gatekeepers
Susie Banikarim R.I.P. Pivot to Video (2017–2017)
Zizi Papacharissi Women come back
Vanessa K. DeLuca Women’s voices take center stage
Betsy O'Donovan and Melody Kramer Skepticism and narcissism
Lam Thuy Vo Breaking free from the tyranny of the loudest
Pia Frey Address users as individuals
Brian Lam Sketchy ethics around product reviews
Monika Bauerlein The firehose of falsehood
Juliette De Maeyer A responsible press criticism
Cory Haik Suffering from realness, pivoting to impact
Cristina Wilson The year of the Instagram Story
Michelle Garcia Navigating journalistic transparency
Jesse Holcomb Information disorder, coming to a congressional district near you
Corey Ford The empire strikes back
Rubina Madan Fillion Unlocking the potential of AI
Jamie Mottram From pageviews to t-shirts
Vivian Schiller Pivot to tomorrow
Nicholas Diakopoulos Fortifying social media from automated inauthenticity
Sarah Marshall Loyalty as the key performance indicator
Rodney Gibbs Tech workers turn to journalism
Andrew Haeg The year journalists become relationship builders
Charo Henríquez Training is an investment, not an expense
Frédéric Filloux External forces
Justin Kosslyn The year journalists become digital security experts
Corey Johnson The pro-fact resistance
An Xiao Mina Memes and visuals come to the fore
Raney Aronson-Rath Transparency is the antidote to fake news
Gordon Crovitz Serving readers over advertisers
Ernst-Jan Pfauth Publishing less to give readers more
Trushar Barot The Jio-fication of India
Sam Ford The year of investing in processes
Damon Krukowski Reviving the alt-weekly soul
Edward Roussel Eyes, ears, and brains
Adam Thomas Sharing is caring: The year of the mentor
Kyle Ellis Let’s build our way out of this
Joanne Lipman Journalists inventing revenue streams
Luke O'Neil The end is already here
Steve Grove The midterms are an opportunity
Rasmus Kleis Nielsen The Snapchat scenario and the risk of more closed platforms
Cindy Royal Your journalism curriculum is obsolete
Millie Tran and Stine Bauer Dahlberg (Hint: It’s about your brand)
Rachel Davis Mersey AI, with real smarts
Matt Carlson Attacks on the press will get worse
Will Sommer The year local media gets conservative
Emily Goligoski Looking beyond news for inspiration
Basile Simon We need better career paths for news nerds
Evie Nagy Pivot to mobile video frustration
Kinsey Wilson Facebook and Google: Help out or pay up
Craig Newmark Working together toward sustainable solutions
José Zamora Revenue-first journalism
Caitlin Thompson Podcasting models mature and diversify
Marie Gilot No assholes allowed
S. Mitra Kalita The arc of news and audience
Mario García Storytelling finally adapts to mobile
Ståle Grut Reclaiming audience interaction from social networks
Jim Moroney Newspapers have to be good enough for readers to pay for
Manoush Zomorodi Self-help as a publishing strategy
Alice Antheaume Are you fluent in AI?
Feli Sánchez The year for guerrilla user research
Tim Carmody Watch out for Spotify
Helen Havlak Keywords, not publishers, power the world’s biggest feeds
Mary Meehan Real lives are at stake in rural areas
Amie Ferris-Rotman More female reporters abroad (please)
Tamar Charney We get serious about algorithms
David Skok Finding an information-life balance
Nushin Rashidian Publishers seek ad dollar alternatives
Marcela Donini and Thiago Herdy Collaboration is the way forward for Brazilian journalism
Jessica Parker Gilbert Design connects storytelling and strategy
Michael Kuntz The only pivot that might work
Taylor Lorenz Social and media will split