This is a non-exhaustive list of useful links on fact-checking. It will be routinely updated – please share any resources you think I’ve left out in the comment section or on twitter @factchecknet.
Practical how-tos, sites on fact-checking news and noteworthy initiatives
Methodologies and How To’s
- Africa Check’s tips and advice on how to fact-check – and their great infographic on how to fact-check
- The eight steps to a good fact check underpinning Chequeado’s ‘Metodo’
- The principles of PolitiFact’s “Truth-O-Meter”
- Think about your corrections – Pagella Politica’s Oops Page
- 5 tips for fact-checking claims about science
- 5 tips for scrutinizing official data sets
Funky formats for fact-checking
- Full Fact’s “Finder” helps its readers do their own fact-checking
- Promise tracking done well – ABC Fact Check
- Superpowering a user’s experience of a speech by annotating it with fact-checks (see Barack Obama’s 2015 State of the Union annotated by PolitiFact)
- Animated videos – fact-checking can be fun (see Libération’s Désintox and Pagella Politica’s Pollock)
- ABC FactCheck’s tiles – all you need to know in one Facebook image
- Chequeado’s coverage of the Argentinian Presidential debate (see also the making of their live coverage of the President’s speech to Congress)
- International fact-checking collaborations: #RefugeeCheck and the G20 fact-checkathon (see the Prezi and the article on the Washington Post)
- Tips of “antiviral” social media design that will allow your fact-checks/debunking to have a greater reach, by Chris Blow for First Draft News
Sources of fact-checking news (besides the IFCN channel on Poynter, of course)
- The Duke Reporter’s Lab, which among other things maintains a database of fact-checking operations around the world
- The American Press Institute’s fact-checking project
Academic research on fact-checking, facts, spreading of lies
- The Hardest Check, a literature review on the impact of fact-checking (Pomares, 2014)
- When corrections fail – on the perils of the ‘backfire effect’ (Nyhan, Reifler 2006). Also read this paper on the “intricacies of setting people straight” (Schwartz et al 2007)
- Comparative study on six fact-checking websites around the world (Graves, 2015 – summary here)
- The effects of fact-checking threat: warning politicians they are going to be monitored reduces likelihood of lying (Nyhan, Reifler 2013)
- Identifying and correcting policy misperceptions: even one correction changes people’s minds (Thorson, 2015)
- Adjudication can correct factual beliefs, increase perceived news quality, satisfy perceived informational needs. However it reduces the belief that you can find truth in politics (Pingree, Brossard, McLeod 2014)
- Format matters – be careful how you phrase a fact-check (Nyhan, Reifler 2012)
- Regret the Error – a great book collecting and critiquing the types of mistakes the media makes and why even when they are funny they are a serious matter (Silverman, 2007)
- “Lies, Damn Lies and Viral Content”. Report by the Tow Center on how and why news organizations share and contrast misinformation (Silverman, 2015)
- unSpun: Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation, a book by the founders of FactCheck.org (Jackson, Jamieson Hall 2007)
- On computational fact-checking check out a fascinating study using knowledge networks to automatize fact-checks (Ciampaglia et al, 2015) and Claimbuster by a team of researchers at Duke and UT Arlington (see the piece on Poynter)
- The Fact-Checker’s Bible, by the former head of the fact-checking department at The New Yorker (Harrison Smith, 2004)
- Fact-checking at The New Yorker, by Peter Canby, director of fact-checking at the magazine
- Conference proceedings of “Fact-checking, fact-finding and avoiding mistakes” held by Spiegel in Hamburg march 2010
- The Debunking Handbook by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky
- API’s latest fact-checking research.
- A continuously updated list of fact-checking-related research from around the world, also by API
- Why people fly from facts – and what we can do about it: research on the appeal of “untestable” beliefs
- Paying people to respond correctly (or say “I don’t know”) results in a reduction in partisan bias on factual beliefs
- A study on the Reddit channel /ChangeMyView found that users did change their views when confronted with contradictory evidence, 30% of the time
