Science Feedback is awarded an IFCN Development Grant to build database on sources of misinformation
Science Feedback is very pleased to be awarded a development grant from the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). This grant aims to further innovation and best practices within the fact-checking field by supporting established fact-checking units that are pursuing projects in 4 areas of focus: tools development, video production, audience building, and new formats testing.
The purpose of a fact-check is to verify one or several claims in published articles, photos, and social media posts. Misleading claims can be widely repeated or shared across the Internet and on social media. One challenge that fact-checkers and web platforms jointly face in their efforts to limit the spread of misinformation to internet users is in identifying and evaluating all or most of the instances where misinformation appears.
With this grant, Science Feedback will expand its efforts to build an open database of websites and social media sources that most actively spread misinformation. This tool, which began development earlier this year, relies on verified data from Poynter’s CoronaVirusFacts Alliance Database, which gathers all fact checks on the novel coronavirus pandemic in one location, and will be expanded with fact checks in other areas. The database is being developed by Science Feedback in collaboration with volunteer programmers and other fact-checkers, and will help fact-checking units more easily identify appearances and sources of misinformation.
Ultimately, the goal of this project is to help internet users, web platforms, social media companies, and search engines better identify reliable and unreliable sources of information.
This grant program is funded through the support of Youtube via the Google News Initiative.
- If you are interested in this project, check out the work we have done so far on https://open.feedback.org/
- If you would like to join our effort to make the Internet a more reliable source of credible information, please consider donating.
