ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. (Aug. 15, 2024) – The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute has awarded $300,000 in “Spread the Facts” grants to 10 fact-checking organizations worldwide to combat AI-generated misinformation on WhatsApp and leverage generative AI to optimize fact-checker workflows.
This initiative, in partnership with Meta, will give awardees greater opportunity to experiment and innovate with WhatsApp functionality to increase the reach of their existing projects and enhance the experience of their audience.
“We are excited to see how these projects will push the boundaries of what’s possible in tackling misinformation on WhatsApp and using AI-driven techniques to do it,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the IFCN.
“We’re excited to deepen our partnership with IFCN and our fact-checking partners across the globe. These projects will help fact-checkers adapt to the latest trends in the fact-checking ecosystem and connect users to accurate, reliable information,” said Clair Deevy, director of external affairs at WhatsApp.
Each of the 10 selected projects will run for six months under the program, which aims to create findings and best practices that benefit the broader fact-checking community.
IFCN announced this latest opportunity earlier this year, and it builds off $450,000 distributed to 11 projects in 2022.
Below are the grant winners and a description of their projects. WhatsApp Business awardees will receive grants of $20,000, while WhatsApp Business Platform + Business Solution Providers (BSP) awardees receive $40,000.
WhatsApp Business App
Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Center (DFRAC) – India
Project: AI Against AI: Fighting Misinformation with Technology on WhatsApp
Digital Forensics, Research and Analytics Center (DFRAC) will use AI to fact-check audio visual content on WhatsApp, especially content shared by social media influencers. The project’s other goals include identification of “deepfake” content and a detailed educational component. A media literacy initiative will include interactive elements such as quizzes, polls, and Q&A sessions. DFRAC’s collaboration with external AI experts and digital forensics specialists will establish a framework for fact-checkers for ongoing AI expert engagement.
FactSpace West Africa – Ghana
Project: WhatsApp Initiative for Strengthening Expertise & Guarding Against Disinformation (WISEGUARD)
The project focuses on political, health, and social issues, targeting the public, media, and civil society in Sub-Saharan Africa.The project will create a chatbot for users to submit content for quick, automatic verification. It will use AI tools to assess submissions and flag suspicious content for human fact-checkers. The project also includes fact-checker training and a public awareness campaign. Success will be measured by submissions, fact checks deployed and user experience. The project will contribute to the broader fact-checking community’s efforts by developing and implementing a scalable and replicable WhatsApp Chatbot solution.
Lupa – Brazil
Project: AI Match
Lupa will develop a system to identify content generated by artificial intelligence, similar to what has already been fact-checked by its newsroom. The system will work not only with the detection of similar texts, but will also analyze similar images and videos, increasing Lupa’s ability to detect misinformation content.
The Stage – Liberia
Project: Pidgin – You geh it teh eye? / Did you verify?
The Stage will focus its project on developing its WhatsApp Business App tip line service and expanding it to make it available for the Pidgin-speaking audience in Liberia. Liberia is home to around 3 million Pidgin speakers, yet the community remains underserved for reliable news and fact-checking, with the majority of media publishing in English. The program includes training and mentoring for the staff of The Stage on WhatsApp use; establishment of a Pidgin channel; and WhatsApp tipline monitoring and publishing. The project’s overarching goal is to create a better model for an effective citizen and fact-checker collaboration against AI-generated disinformation.
Verify Media Platform – Turkey
Project: Verify+ ًAI bot
Verify Media platform specializes in fact-checking content for audiences in Syria and members of the Syrian diaspora abroad. Of those using social media in Syria, 98% use WhatsApp. Verify seeks to develop an AI-powered chatbot that will be able to accept public requests for fact checks via WhatsApp. Its bot would then search a vetted fact-checking database and compose potential replies. Success will be measured by verification requests, engagement rates, and user feedback on the effectiveness and accuracy of the bot. Verify will share activity documentation for other fact-checkers to use as a blueprint.
WhatsApp Business Platform + BSP
Aos Fatos – Brazil
Project: Fátima 3.0
Aos Fatos plans to upgrade its award-winning Fátima chatbot with a large language model (LLM) capability that is currently in beta testing, and to make the new functionality available widely. This process will include rigorous stress testing and spam control; backend adjustments and technology upgrades; both automatic and manual testing; extensive user feedback; and a public promotional campaign. Fátima will serve as a blueprint for news organizations to ethically use generative AI to increase impact and develop new ways of engaging with readers. Aos Fatos will develop a best practices manual for IFCN verified signatories that could also be adopted by technology companies aiming to increase the reliability of their chatbots.
Facta – Italy
Project: AI-powered chatbot to optimize response to climate-related misinfo
Facta sees an urgent need to provide young people with immediate corrective information concerning climate-related misinformation. Its project will build a generative AI-powered chatbot that will be a virtual expert in climate-related information and that can offer timely and effective answers to the climate-related questions. Automatization of the chatbot will help reduce the time-gap between viral misinformation and related debunks, and it will leave more resources available for original fact-checking. Facta believes the project will create lessons for fact-checkers anywhere seeking to more proactively debunk climate misinformation, a process that often requires more scientific expertise in sourcing than other topics.
Factly – India
Project: Increasing Capacity & Reducing WhatsApp Tipline Response Time with SACH Browser Extension Chatbot Powered by Gen AI
Factly wants to create a WhatsApp tip line with greater accuracy, faster turnaround time and more automation. To do this, Factly has developed a browser-extension AI Chatbot named SACH that draws on established fact-checking work accessed via ClaimReview and Google’s search-by-image API. The extension uses the power of generative AI to respond to user queries by only searching the specific database curated by Factly. Factly believes its fact-informed database curation can reduce hallucinations to near zero. Factly’s project will integrate the SACH chatbot into its WhatsApp tipline with a goal of dramatically reducing turnaround time for user queries and increasing subscribers to the tipline. Such a method will be transferable to other fact-checking chatbots.
Factchequeado – USA
Project: Combating Immigration Disinformation: Development of an AI-Powered Chatbot for Latino Communities
Factchequeado will launch a Spanish-language WhatsApp project centered on countering disinformation scams about migration that target the Latino community in the United States. One significant challenge is AI-generated audio, where scammers use deepfake technology to mimic government officers or celebrities. Currently, there are no reliable tools to effectively identify and counteract such sophisticated disinformation. Factchequeado’s activities will focus on updating its chatbot to classify migration-specific disinformation; develop authoritative sourcing on migration for chatbot usage; chatbot development and testing; superior tech support and a promotional campaign for the chatbot once deployed. The methodologies and tools developed through this project will be shared with the fact-checking community.
Maldita – Spain
Project: NARRADisinfo: Narrative and AI Responses for Resilience Against Disinformation
Maldita has a mature WhatsApp service to verify content submitted by users, but the volume of queries means that not all content can be fact-checked. Meanwhile, disinformation narratives circulate and are reinforced at a speed much higher than fact-checkers’ capacity to tackle specific content. Maldita intends to use AI-improvements and large language models (LLMs) to better analyze and identify disinformation narratives that evolve and change through time. The analysis will be integrated into a user dashboard so that human fact-checkers can more effectively monitor and evaluate large streams of content and more quickly identify evolving narratives. By focusing on narrative identification via technology, Maldita will provide an important best practice model.
Media Contact:
Angie Drobnic Holan
Director, International Fact-Checking Network
aholan@poynter.org
+1-727-410-1770
