No Cover Image

Journal article 433 views 94 downloads

True or False: Studying the Work Practices of Professional Fact-Checkers

Nicholas Micallef Orcid Logo, Vivienne Armacost, Nasir Memon, Sameer Patil

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Volume: 6, Issue: CSCW1, Pages: 1 - 44

Swansea University Author: Nicholas Micallef Orcid Logo

  • 3512974.pdf

    PDF | Version of Record

    © 2022 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike International 4.0 License.

    Download (1.57MB)

Check full text

DOI (Published version): 10.1145/3512974

Abstract

Misinformation has developed into a critical societal threat that can lead to disastrous societal consequences. Although fact-checking plays a key role in combating misinformation, relatively little research has empirically investigated work practices of professional fact-checkers. To address this g...

Full description

Published in: Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction
ISSN: 2573-0142
Published: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2022
Online Access: Check full text

URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa60585
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Abstract: Misinformation has developed into a critical societal threat that can lead to disastrous societal consequences. Although fact-checking plays a key role in combating misinformation, relatively little research has empirically investigated work practices of professional fact-checkers. To address this gap, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 fact-checkers from 19 countries. The participants reported being inundated with information that needs filtering and prioritizing prior to fact-checking. The interviews surfaced a pipeline of practices fragmented across disparate tools that lack integration. Importantly, fact-checkers lack effective mechanisms for disseminating the outcomes of their efforts which prevents their work from fully achieving its potential impact. We found that the largely manual and labor intensive nature of current fact-checking practices is a barrier to scale. We apply these findings to propose a number of suggestions that can improve the effectiveness, efficiency, scale, and reach of fact-checking work and its outcomes.
Keywords: Fact-checking, fact-checker, journalism, work practices, misinformation, disinformation, social media
College: Faculty of Science and Engineering
Issue: CSCW1
Start Page: 1
End Page: 44