Citizen Beta #23: statistics, fact checking and data journalism

It’s taken me a couple of days to recover from the brilliant Citizen Beta we’ve just had. So much to process!

We were joined by Andy Dudfield from the Office for National Statistcs, Simon Rogers from Google, John Walton from the BBC, and Lev and I showed off some recent Full Fact work.

The audience was made up of journalists, technologists, civil servants and all round amazing folk.

Citizen Beta #23: statistics, fact checking and data journalism

Crowdsourced Fact checking

In the current climate of information overload the demand for fact checking is increasing. Factcheckers are often small teams that struggle to keep up with the demand. In recent years, new organisations like WikiTribune have suggested crowdsourcing as an attractive and low-cost way for fact checking to scale.

I believe there’s a role for crowdsourced fact checking, but (so far) it’s not fact checking. Here’s my take.

Crowdsourced Fact checking

State of Automated Fact Checking Report

In 2016 I co wrote the State of Automated Fact Checking [PDF], an in-depth report looking at where we are with automated factchecking globally, and where we could get to with the necessary funding.

It set out Full Fact’s roadmap for our own work on automated fact checking, and our design principles for the tools we were starting to build. We proposed principles of collaboration for factchecking organisations, researchers and computer scientists around the world.

State of Automated Fact Checking Report