Combatting Fake News

AllSides strengthens our democratic society with balanced news, diverse perspectives, and real conversation.
We expose people to information and ideas from all sides of the political spectrum so they can better understand the world — and each other. Our balanced news coverage, media bias ratings, civil dialogue opportunities, and technology platform are available for everyone and can be integrated by schools, nonprofits, media companies, and more.

The C-SPAN Video Library began within the Purdue University School of Liberal Arts in 1987 under the leadership of Dr. Robert X. Browning, who sought a way to archive and index the thousands of hours of congressional coverage produced by the network every year. The project quickly became one of the most comprehensive video archives of governmental and political content, and C-SPAN assumed responsibility for the archival operations in July 1998. This includes transcripts. Among its many holdings are all the televised presidential debates on tape since 1960 along with transcripts, which are searchable. Over 250,000 hours of recordings to choose from. C-SPAN is a neutral source of information.

The Computational Propaganda Research Project (COMPROP) investigates the interaction of algorithms, automation and politics. This work includes analysis of how tools like social media bots are used to manipulate public opinion by amplifying or repressing political content, disinformation, hate speech, and junk news.

We use perspectives from organizational sociology, human computer interaction, communication, information science, and political science to interpret and analyze the evidence we are gathering. Our project is based at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford.

We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

FactCheck.org is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. The APPC was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state and federal levels.

The Flip Side is on a mission to help bridge the gap between liberals and conservatives. We’re a one-stop shop for smart, concise summaries of political analysis from both conservative and liberal media. Our goal is to become a news source for liberals, moderates, independents, conservatives, and even the apolitical.

A look at what did not happen last week. From the Associated Press.

PolitiFact seeks to present the true facts, unaffected by agenda or biases. Their journalists set their own opinions aside as they work to uphold principles of independence and fairness. As part of that effort, PolitiFact journalists avoid the public expression of political opinion and public involvement in the political process.

Each day, PolitiFact journalists look for statements to fact-check. They read transcripts, speeches, news stories, press releases, and campaign brochures. They select the most newsworthy and significant ones.

This excellent article from CNET discusses how to search images to find the original source. This often helps to discover fake news by discovering the original source of a faked picture. This is also useful to prevent yourself from being sucked into a scam.

TruthBeTold.news (formerly called HU Insight) is a non-profit, non-partisan website and digital network, run and edited from Howard University’s Department of Media, Journalism and Film in the School of Communications. It uses journalistic skills and crowdsourced information to play a leading role by examining claims about the black community in public debate. It also serves as a fun but, serious learning environment for students to teach them advanced reporting tools in a way that is engaging and allows them to use the social media skills they already possess.

This is a search string that limits results to only the weekly report and sorts the list to show the newest first. This report is not documented and does not have easy access.