Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) has released a chatbot on WhatsApp where people can message and check on fake news claims. Replies from IFCN’s database of debunked fake news will be available to people at +1 (727) 2912606.
Baybars Örsek, director at IFCN, Poynter Institute, said the chatbot which is available in English alone, and will be released in Hindi soon. “The service is launching in English but will be available in other languages, including Hindi, Portuguese and Spanish, in due course. We are working to include other languages in due course,” Örsek said.
A release from WhatsApp said through the bot, people can check whether a piece of content about Covid-19 has already been rated as false by professional fact checkers.
“Since January, more than 80 fact-checking organisations from 74 countries have identified more than 4,000 hoaxes related to the novel coronavirus. All this information now forms the CoronaVirusFacts database and is updated daily by the IFCN so that chatbot users can navigate and easily access its content,” the release said.
Örsek said that users can search for these debunked news through the chatbot. “The IFCN bot is primarily a way to distribute fact checks to WhatsApp users and to provide access to a searchable database on coronavirus debunked hoaxes. It allows users to review IFCN’s database of 4,000 debunked myths, to search for fact checks by word or phrase, access to tips to protect themselves from falsehoods, and also to find out how to contact local fact checkers in their country,” he said.
Through the bot, a user can access a global directory of fact-checking organisations, and the user’s country is detected from the mobile country code to provide contacts of fact-checking organisations which are closest. “The person can then submit a piece of information for review directly to its local fact checker or visit it,” WhatsApp said in a release.
With the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a spike in the volume of fake news, and WhatsApp has been grappling with it, especially in India where it has over 450 million users. As the pandemic spread, the private messaging platform brought in product changes, including reducing the number forwards of a ‘highly forwarded message’ to just one chat. The company says this has brought down virality of messages which has already reduced the number of highly forwarded messages by 70%.
Örsek said some of these fake news items were about symptoms of the disease. “The first couple of weeks after the first case was detected outside of China, we have seen so many pieces of misinformation on the spread of the virus and false symptoms. It had been the case especially in Europe, where the virus spread from Italy to Spain and then eventually to the different parts of the world where we saw a big volume of misinformation on the spread of the virus,” he said.
