UK fact-checking group Full Fact has been given a large cash injection by the Open Society Foundations, and Omidyar Network to produce two new tools to counter what it calls “misinformation”.
Full Fact announced the $500,000 (£386,000) donation on Thursday, explaining that the money is to build and launch ‘Live’ and ‘Trends’, automated tools which the charity hopes will make their ‘fact-checking’ findings much more influential.
Live is based on the premise that “people, especially politicians” tend to repeat themselves, according to Full Fact communications manager Mevan Babakar, and will monitor real-time sources such as live TV subtitles.
Connected to the charity’s database, Live would be able to flag instances when a claim that has been checked is repeated, connecting to Full Fact’s most recent article.
“Journalists would have that transcript in real time and they would be able to say, for example, ‘I can see here that you’ve said poverty is down, but actually there are two measures of poverty – one is going up and one is going down, so why did you choose to pick that one?’”, explained Babakar.
Trends will document each time an incorrect claim is made, and by whom, so that fact-checkers can track where misleading claims are coming from.
Full Fact said that both tools will be available in newsrooms by the end of this year, and launched to journalists and fact-checkers across the globe in 2018.
“Modern technology allows misleading claims to be spread at a faster rate than ever before,” said Will Moy, director of Full Fact.
He added: “The next step is to develop a global infrastructure for automated factchecking. Live and Trends are central to that. We’ll be talking more about this at the Global Fact conference in Madrid next week.”
A nonprofit investment firm established by liberal, billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, the Omidyar Network has granted huge sums helping organisations to fight “hate speech” on the internet, and “restore trust” in U.S. government institutions.
The network also funds the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), an organisation partnered with Facebook to help determine whether certain stories should be flagged as “disputed”, which is also funded by globalist billionaire George Soros.
Documents leaked last year revealed that the Hungarian financier spent $6 million (£4,644,000) to influence the 2014 European Parliament elections, his Open Society Foundations hoping to “mitigate the feared populist surge” and “limit the damage” it believed was caused by “xenophobic” and Eurosceptic campaigns.
Breitbart London reported how Soros funded numerous projects to “monitor”, “shame” and “ridicule” what the group calls “hate speech” across Europe and that while attempting to stamp down on identity politics for Europeans, the organisation also sought to “amplify” ethnic minority votes in the elections.
The BBC this week said it too intends to fight “fake news”, the state broadcaster announcing that it plans to expand its “Reality Check” fact-checking features.
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