How can you tell fact from fiction on the Internet? Join the Truthsquad, a community fact-checking experiment led by NewsTrust, with the help of our partners at the Poynter Institute, our advisors at FactCheck.org -- and the generous support of Omidyar Network and MacArthur Foundation.
UPDATE: Check our full report about Truthsquad on the NewsTrust blog.
For our first pilot the week of August 2nd, 2010, we invited our members to help fact-check controversial quotes from politicians and pundits. Each day of that week, our editors featured daily quotes to research, and asked the community whether they were true or false. These short quotes were excerpted from recent news reports, opinions or political ads suggested by our community and partners.
Each quote page displayed links to factual evidence that supported or opposed the statement. We invited our community to review these links before giving an answer. We encouraged participants to change their answers at any time, as we all found more facts and posted new links. We also held lively discussions of the quotes in the comment sections.
Throughout this pilot, we updated this blog post to add more stories to fact-check and share our verdict. Our Truthsquad overview page now lists twelve controversial quotes for review. If you haven't already, you are welcome to fact-check them as well. Before you do, be sure to read our FAQ and the 'Learn More' section below (and try not to read the verdicts on this page).
We will post the overall pilot results and our findings on our blog on Wed. August 11th.
Each Wednesday this month, we will also post a new quote to fact-check. What should we research next? Suggest a quote for next week’s Truthsquad to "editors-at-newstrust-dot-net."
If you would like to support this project, please make a donation, so we can can continue to provide this service through the end of the year.
Learn More
For more detailed instructions on how to participate in Truthsquad, read our FAQ. To learn more about fact-checking and finding good journalism online, we invite you to read our guides, especially these:
- Tools of the Trade from FactCheckEd.org (video)
- PolitiFact's Guide to Fact-checking from PolitiFact (video)
- Crap Detection 101 from Howard Rheingold (NewsTrust board member)
- Think Like A Journalist from Michael Bugeja (NewsTrust advisor)
SPOILER ALERT: Be sure to answer the quotes listed on our Truthsquad overview page before you read the verdicts below.
Truthsquad Verdicts
Each day during our pilot, the Truthsquad editors (Fabrice Florin, Kelly McBride, Jon Mitchell and Steve Myers) evaluated our collective answers. We gave our verdict when we had enough factual evidence to pronounce a quote true or false.
Here are our verdicts for the twelve quotes we fact-checked during this pilot.
- "Seniors guaranteed Medicare benefits will remain the same" under the Affordable Care Act
By Kathleen Sebelius, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services
Our verdict: HALF TRUE - Decline in illegal immigration to U.S. "due to the recession," not enforcement
By Dick Morris, Fox News consultant
Our verdict: MOSTLY FALSE - Environmental impact of the oil spill "much less than everyone feared."
By Jacqueline Michel, Geochemist
Our verdict: MOSTLY TRUE - "87 million Americans will be forced out of their coverage" by Obama's health care plan
By Orrin Hatch, U.S. Senator
Our verdict: FALSE - "Meek lobbied for big tobacco against children's healthcare."
By Jeff Greene (D-FL), U.S. Senate candidate
Our verdict: MOSTLY FALSE - "Warren Buffett called Greene's scheme 'financial weapons of mass destruction.'"
By Kendrick Meek (D-FL), U.S. Senate candidate
Our verdict: FALSE - "The 'Bush tax cuts' ... remain the single largest cause of America's structural deficit."
By Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post
Our verdict: TRUE - "Norton pushed the largest tax hike in Colorado history."
By Americans For Job Security
Our verdict: MOSTLY FALSE - Obama's choice for budget chief "received more than $900,000 from Citigroup"
By Jim McElhatton, The Washington Times
Our verdict: TRUE - "CIA and Google investing in "a company that monitors the web... to predict the future."
By Noah Shachtman, Wired
Our verdict: TRUE - "Crime is totally out of control" in Phoenix
By Bill O'Reilly, Fox News
Our verdict: FALSE - "There's no evidence of any significant concentration of oil that we haven't accounted for."
By Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Our verdict: FALSE
Correction: We have amended our verdict for the Washington Times story stating that Jacob Lew, Obama's choice for budget chief, received a $900,000 bonus from Citigroup. We now conclude that this statement is TRUE, after verifying factual evidence from the State Department, which supports that claim. Our original verdict for this claim was "Half True." We regret any inconvenience which our preliminary verdict may have caused.
What do you think?
How do you like Truthsquad? Add your comments below, or email your comments and suggestions to "feedback-at-newstrust.net," after you've tried fact-checking some of the quotes from our first pilot. What were your first impressions? What do you like most? least? what could be improved? which of these quotes do you find most interesting? were they easy or hard to answer?
Next steps
Now that this pilot is over, we will analyze the results and raise funds for more Truthsquads in the fall. During that time, we will continue to post a new quote every Wednesday, on the Truthsquad overview page.
What should we fact-check next? If you come across a good quote to research on Truthsquad, please email it to our editors at "editors-at-newstrust.net." We're looking for short, recent quotes from politicians or pundits, on public interest topics in the news. These should be 'statements of fact' (not opinions). Our members should be able to verify it on their own, by checking links to factual evidence supporting or opposing each statement. Quotes should be no longer than thirty-five words, and the full text of the quote should available online, from a trusted source.
Thanks to our Team, Partners and Community
Many thanks to our worldclass team, for their wonderful work in building Truthsquad: Subramanya Sastry, Caleb Waldorf, David Fox, Jon Mitchell and Kaizar Campwala created another great application of the NewsTrust platform in just a month.
Many thanks as well to our whole community, who helped us design this service through surveys, emails and phone conferences over the past two years. We're very grateful to all our members, advisors, partners and friends who took the time to propose new ideas, check our early designs, test our site and share their invaluable feedback.
Thanks to our Partners and Funders
We also really appreciate the great support of our partners at the Poynter Institute (Kelly McBride, Steve Myers and Julie Moos) and our advisors at FactCheck.org (Brooks Jackson), for collaborating with us on this experiment.
Last but not least, we're deeply grateful to our backers at Omidyar Network and the MacArthur Foundation for their wonderful support of this project. Thanks to them, Truthsquad offers a whole new way for citizens to inform and engage each other on public issues, and tell apart fact from fiction on the web.
Make a donation
Donate today so we can host more programs like Truthsquad in the fall.
We hope that Truthsquad can provide a useful fact-checking solution to the public, as well as help participants like us become more discerning about what the news they get on the web. This first pilot should give us all an introduction to the discipline of factual verification, under the guidance of professionals from Poynter and Factcheck. If this pilot is successful, we are prepared to offer the Truthsquad service on an ongoing basis in the fall (we own the truthsquad.com domain).
Thanks for your interest in Truthsquad!
-- by Fabrice Florin, Jon Mitchell and the NewsTrust Team
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