Professional fact-checkers in recent years have sought to share their skills with both the public and other journalists by creating training programs in fact-checking, investigative techniques and media literacy. Groups like Chequeado in Argentina, First Check in India, and AFP FactCheck in France have designed courses for an array of purposes.
This year AFP introduced new modules on fact-checking worldwide elections. Many consider 2024 to be one of the busiest election seasons ever, with estimates finding that roughly half the global population is voting in national, regional or local elections.
As a France-based wire service with a global presence, AFP has worked to make training available to journalists worldwide and in multiple languages. Its open-access digital verification training, launched two years ago, was honored in April by the Webby Awards, considered one of the Internet’s highest recognitions. WAN-IFRA named AFP the world’s best fact-checking project for 2024.
Elections are a key topic at this year’s GlobalFact 11 conference. I spoke with Sophie Nicholson, AFP Digital Investigation’s deputy chief editor, on Zoom about the courses, including AFP’s election-year offerings. Here’s our conversation, which has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Enock Nyariki: Can you share your journey with AFP’s digital investigation operations and how your role has evolved over time?
Sophie Nicholson: I started working at the beginning of AFP’s digital investigation operations in 2017, when we had just one French fact-checker. Now, I’m deputy chief editor of this department. Initially, we were a small team. I traveled around, training people in Latin America and Africa as we grew. We built the team and structure, collaborating with platforms and partners on various projects.
I’ve worked internally to share our niche fact-checking skills with journalists because they are useful. To me, there’s a real overlap between journalism and fact-checking. Some say they are different, but I see a lot of valuable overlap and shared skills.
Nyariki: What motivated AFP to launch online training modules for reporters to fact-check elections and to make them open to anyone?
Nicholson: Since we started fact-checking in 2017, creating high-quality training has been a priority. Our team has grown significantly, now with over 150 fact-checkers worldwide. With the rapid changes in disinformation techniques and social platforms, continuous learning is crucial.
Initially, we traveled to different places to train people. We realized that an online platform would best reach as many people as possible. With support from the Google News Initiative, we improved our training and offered it in multiple languages, including English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
Currently, our platform has over 19,000 journalists and students enrolled. We offer 15 courses on topics like online searching, geolocation and tackling climate and health disinformation. Recently, we focused on election modules due to the increase in disinformation during elections.
We first published the election training as a two-part module but later divided it into three:
- Political ads and campaigns: Monitoring election campaigns and common disinformation about candidates, parties, and the electoral system
- Election day and aftermath: Issues on election day and following weeks, including false voting requirements and fraud claims
- Advanced tools: Monitoring campaigns, tracking political ads, and additional resources for tackling election disinformation
Our courses are interactive, featuring videos, examples, quizzes and resources. Created by experienced trainers, they are continuously updated.
We also produce short videos available on YouTube and other social media platforms. These quick videos, often under a minute, complement the training modules. We developed a special series for European elections in eight languages to debunk disinformation across the EU.
The online platform allows us to leverage the experiences and skills of our global fact-checkers, continuously updating and improving the courses. This makes it a dynamic and valuable resource for journalists and journalism students worldwide.
Nyariki: What do you hope journalists will take away from the courses?
Nicholson: We hope they’ll gain new skills they can use immediately. The courses are practical and clearly explained, so you finish knowing you can apply what you’ve learned in your daily work.
Nyariki: As the largest team of fact-checkers in the world, what trends have you seen in the spread of election misinformation this year that other fact-checkers preparing for elections should be aware of?
Nicholson: Around elections, fact-checkers and journalists need to be extra careful when checking sources and verifying claims. There’s a lot of talk about deepfakes, especially audio deepfakes, which are more common than video deepfakes in election campaigns. Audio deepfakes are easier to create and can be very difficult to verify. In some countries, we’ve seen bans on deepfakes in political campaigns.
Mainly, we see doctored images proliferate around elections. These attack political opponents, make accusations of voter fraud, or allege bad behavior from politicians, like smoking pot or not having the right nationality to stand. There are also publications about barriers to voting aimed at discouraging people from going to the polls. We encourage fact-checkers to verify these claims quickly.
Nyariki: Have you seen a surge in AI-generated misinformation in the past few months, as the technology has become available to users?
Nicholson: It’s not the majority of what we’re fact-checking, although it depends on the location. In some places, like India, we’ve seen a lot of AI-generated misinformation. Even there, it’s still not the majority of false claims we encounter.
Nyariki: From AFP’s 15 courses, tell us more about one that has proven most popular with journalists.
Nicholson: Actually, I’ll tell you about three. The most popular is searching efficiently online. Close to that is the course on searching on social media. These two are the most popular. Almost equally popular is the course on finding the origin of a photo or video, including the InVID WeVerify tool, co-developed by AFP. There’s massive interest in this tool, both in our courses and videos.
Nyariki: How many languages and countries do you cover in your fact-checking?
Nicholson: We cover 26 languages in our fact-checking. On the platform, we have courses in four languages. Our coverage is global, so we don’t count the countries. As a news agency, we sometimes cover misinformation from places where we don’t have a fact-checker, which is why we no longer provide a specific number of countries.
Nyariki: What major challenges did you face while developing this course aimed at a worldwide audience?
Nicholson: We can’t include examples from every country, but similar examples often resonate globally. Many disinformation narratives cross borders, so seeing something not specific to a country can still be helpful.
We aim to show the most useful tools and platforms that fact-checkers worldwide use. Feedback from individual fact-checkers is crucial for keeping the platform up to date. Given the challenge of not being able to include every platform or cover every country, we must be selective about which ones to feature.
Initially, we wanted to work in many languages, but maintaining high quality and keeping training up-to-date was too much work. We needed dedicated staff for high-quality training in multiple languages.
So, while we’d love more languages, we’re currently limited. We produce short videos in different languages whenever possible to reach more people, but translating and updating full courses is challenging.
Every time there’s a change, like Twitter becoming X, we have to update all languages, and there’s always a change. We try to keep as many tools and resources relevant to as many people as possible.
Nyariki: From your experience in the last two years, what advice do you have for other fact-checking organizations interested in creating similar courses?
Nicholson: Start small and focus on your expertise. Do what you know well and don’t go beyond your expertise initially. Identify your audience and how to present to them. Test it on many people, expect to tweak and improve, and listen to feedback before releasing it.
We researched by looking at online training on various topics, not just in our field. We saw many out-of-date training programs and didn’t want ours to be that way. The feedback we’re getting now is that people appreciate our continuous updates and evolution. Keeping it valid and useful is what has worked for us.
Nyariki: Can you share a success story or a significant impact that has resulted from one of AFP’s investigation courses?
Nicholson: Well, it’s more about the feedback we’ve received. We’ve had really nice feedback, especially from journalism schools that have integrated our courses into their programs. In France, for instance, we have two big journalism schools, Sciences Po and CFJ, that give the courses to their students during the summer holidays. We’ve received great feedback from them.
Journalism schools find our courses useful because, working in the field, we can provide recent examples and up-to-date tools that are relevant. We’ve also seen integration in journalism schools in Hong Kong and Brazil.
We’ve also received recognition for our training platform, including by the Webby Awards (in the category of “Websites and Mobile Sites”) in 2024.
Nyariki: What are your plans with the training program?
Nicholson: We want to keep the training relevant and up to date. We’re doing in-person workshops around the world to provide more in-depth training, and we have short videos that complement the courses. We’re also planning to start live workshops on topics that are changing particularly fast, like AI-generated content. We also aim to build a community of people who are interested in this work and can share experiences and examples. That’s what we’re thinking about at the moment.
