Making your fact-checked data work

Fact-checkers do a great job verifying information and uncovering disinformation.
However, when they publish their results they almost always do this via low-impact websites, and in a non-standard format. Or, worse, their info is stored in a Word Document or PDF file.

This is bad news because most internet users or even journalists do not visit fact-checking websites when there are consuming online news, info and analysis. They almost never download or share digital documents.

This means that websites are a poor way to distribute fact-checked data. Such websites have a very limited audience and because each one uses a different data structure, search engines usually treat them the same as blog-posts or standaard articles.

Data Structure? What’s that all about?

All information (data) has a structure - even a simple blog post would have a structure that looks something like this:

People and computers (e.g.search engines) are very familiar with this format, so blog posts and articles are easy to find and read. However, if we want people and computers to find, use and understand our factchecked content, then we should save this work in a standard ‘fact checking’ format (a standard data structure).

Thankfully, this already exists.

It’s called Claim Review and because we store our fact-checks according to this standard, search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing can read, understand and use our data in more creative ways and share it with many more people. Claim Review also makes is much easier for 3rd party apps or researchers to access our data - making our work even more useful!

By using the Claim Review standard, and saving our fact checks in a standard data format, our information c an have a much larger audience and therefore greater impact.

This is why Disinfo Tech has designed and built a new content management system (CMS) called Bullring - designed exclusively for fact-checkers using the Claim Review data standard.