How can I use this website?

You can use the reports generated by this website to help understand what type of misinformation and fact-checks spread and what demographics appear to be the most affected. Reports are updated every Monday.

How are you defining misinformation?

Fact-checking organisations from around the world determine which information is reliable and which information is not. We automatically collect their output and use it to search for misinforming content.

What does the report version numbers mean?

The Fact-checking observatory relies on automatic methods for collecting and processing fact-checked and misinforming content. As we improve our approaches for collecting data and generating more accurate data, the corresponding reports are updated. The data and report version numbers are designed for tracking which methodology and data was used for generating a report.

The version numbers are divided as follows: major.minor.patch. For example, a report version 1.2.3 has the following values major = 1, minor = 2 and patch = 3. A change in a major number indicates a fundamental change in the report methodology or data collection approach. A change in the minor number highlights small changes in the way data is collected or additional report analyses. Finally, changes in the patch number indicate bug fixes or small interface changes.

When are reports updated?

Although reports are computed from Monday to Sunday data, it generally takes a few additional days for generating new reports. Typically, new reports are released every Tuesday or Wednesday.

Where does the data comes from?

Our data comes from Fact-checking websites. For the Covid-19 data, we use content from the CoronaVirusFacts/DatosCoronaVirus Alliance Database. For the social media posts we use a crawler that collects data automatically from Twitter.

Why so few posts?

We collect data using URLs identified by fact-checker as misinforming content. This reduces our ability to find duplicated content that uses different URLs. However, this approaches avoid false positives (i.e., incorrect misinforming URLs) when collecting data from Twitter. We continuously try to improve our data collection approach and will update our reports as our data collection improves.

Who created this website?

This website was developed as part of a Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF) grant at the Knowledge Media Institute at the Open University.

I have a question/suggestion. Where do I contact you?

If you have a question or suggestion please contact the main maintainer at the following address: g.burel@open.ac.uk.