It is when the clarion voice of House of Commons Speaker John Bercow calls “Jeremy Corbyn”, that Full Fact swings into action. It is midday on a Wednesday in late March, and in the fact-checking charity’s office in central London, all eyeballs are on two TVs showing Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). Since its inception in 2010, Full Fact has been parsing claims from British politicians and media, cross-referencing them with reliable data and labelling them as inaccurate or correct. Claims are picked from sources including TV programmes such as Question Time or Newsnight, newspapers, electoral materials, and PMQs, which Full Fact probes before posting results in real time on Twitter.

Opposite the screens, near a window overlooking St. James’s, senior fact-checker Claire Milne, one of five in the verification team, sits at a Post-It-plastered desk, facing three monitors. A live PMQs transcript scrolls on one of them. If Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn or anyone else makes a claim that resembles something Full Fact has already assessed, an alert pops up, linking to the pertinent fact-check. Sometimes the spotter works, sometimes it stumbles. Here, the system rightly serves an analysis of access to mental-health services when the prime minister mentions the subject, but later on it rattles off stats on crime figures when May is simply deploring hate crimes. Milne tweets the link to the mental-health fact-check channel and flags the incorrect suggestion to the tech team.

Senior fact-checker Joseph O’Leary paces the room as if it were the deck of a boat sailing treacherous waters. On the screens, May and Corbyn trade barbs and figures. The Prime Minister says that mental-health spending has increased to “a record £11.6 billion”. The Opposition leader retorts that spending “fell by £600 million between 2010 and 2015”.


O’ Leary, a jovial man in his late twenties, shakes his head. “We don’t know if that’s a record level,” he says, as official data are incomplete. Milne posts as much in a thread of tweets. The debate shifts to the NHS. “Can you find something generic about spending on health?” O’Leary asks. Joël Reland, a fact-checker with black-rimmed glasses, starts searching.

Corbyn and May keep lobbing figures.

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Claims will be broken down to essentials: facts, numbers, contextual information – which in turn will be dissected and compared with data from the Government, institutions such as the Office for National Statistics, or research organisations such as the Institute for Fiscal Studies. In some cases, Full Fact will ask the opinion of independent experts. If the facts cannot be found anywhere, one of the fact-checkers will phone the person who made the claim and ask where they got the information. The eventual outcome will be an online article providing “the whole picture” about the claim, often with the aid of graphs and always linking to the original sources. At the top of the page, there will be a banner juxtaposing the original statement with Full Fact’s conclusion.

Full Fact only checks declarations about the economy, Europe, health, crime, education, immigration and law, focusing on national politics and limiting itself to claims that can be verified with publicly available information: O’Leary, for example, will not touch the Cambridge Analytica scandal, until after an inquiry.


“We take the view that if a member of the public had to check this information, could they? If they can, we’ll fact-check that,” he says. Are Full Fact researchers just full-time citizens?, I ask. A half-smile flickers on O’Leary’s lips. “Full-time citizens with a lot of skills.”

Once upon a time, a fact-checker was a person working on a newspaper or magazine, who made sure that stories reporters filed were grounded in reality: they called sources, double-checked quotes and pored over archives to verify points of fact. Such a figure can still be found in some larger publications’ offices – The New Yorker’s fact-checking unit has attained quasi-legendary fame. But, in the early noughties, “fact-checker” came to signify something else: someone whose job is not to avoid mistakes being printed, but to call out people (often politicians) who – willingly or otherwise – pollute the public debate with inaccuracies.

The first independent political fact-checking website, FactCheck.org, launched in the US in 2003 – the brainchild of a reporter and an academic who had spent years scrutinising political ads. It billed itself as a “consumer advocate for voters”, besieged and bewildered by campaign-trail whoppers and political fact-massaging. Two years later, Channel 4 launched FactCheck, the UK’s first fact-checking blog.

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Academics explain fact-checking partially as a reaction to the internet’s great disintermediation: the web weakened traditional media’s vice-like grip on information, allowing anyone – from citizen journalists, to cranks, to Twitter-happy politicians – to become a news source in their own right. The end of media gatekeeping resulted in a lot of noise, and fact-checkers stepped in to sort the wheat from the chaff – ironically, by launching websites.


Fact-checking is also – even if some fact-checking groups are offshoots of established news outlets – a not-so-veiled piece of criticism of how traditional media operate.

“The rise of fact-checkers in the US happened because politicians were making claims that were inaccurate, and weren’t being corrected by the media,” says Michelle Amazeen, assistant professor at Boston University’s College of Communication. “The US media is driven primarily by the mantra of ‘If it bleeds, it leads’: they focus on the political horse-race – who’s ahead, who’s behind, rather than on the accuracy of the candidates’ policy statements.”

Besides sensationalism, bias and, more recently, traffic-driven churnalism, American fact-checkers resented the so-called “he said, she said” fallacy: the idea that objectivity is best attained by giving a platform to each side of a debate, regardless of the accuracy of their claims. Similar issues were also present in the UK, where a partisan press coexisted with the sometimes puzzling conceit of impartiality on television news.

“In British television, you have this concept of ‘BBC balance’: as a journalist, your job is to look at the story, give equal weight to both sides, and your job is done,” says Patrick Worrall, lead writer of Channel 4’s FactCheck. “But it’s frustrating when you watch the news and there are people on each side screaming at each other over a factual dispute. I think it’s journalists’ job to act on this recurring factual dispute.” (The BBC launched its own “Reality Check” in 2015.)

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Over the last decade, fact-checking organisations have mushroomed around the world. According to Reporters’ Lab at Duke University, as of November 2018, 161 fact-checking outfits were operating globally. In September 2015, the realisation that a new phenomenon was taking place led a group of fact-checkers from various countries to launch the International Fact-Checking Network under the aegis of The Poynter Institute, a journalism school based in Florida. One year later, the Network issued a code laying down five core rules of fact-checking: nonpartisanship and fairness; transparency of sources; transparency of funding and organisation; transparency of methodology; and open and honest corrections. It counts 53 verified signatories, including Full Fact.

Some of the challenges fact-checkers grapple with are roughly similar, regardless of where they are based: online fake content and obfuscating politicians can as easily be found in France as in, say, Brazil. Other issues are more geographically specific. Take Istanbul-based fact-checking website Dogruluk Payi: since its launch in 2014, it has witnessed Turkey descend into polarisation, authoritarianism, and diminished freedom of the press. Such turmoil has only made Dogruluk Payi more relevant, as its non-partisan, data-based articles are less amenable to governmental intervention.

“Compared with journalists, our work is allowing us to be more active,” founder Baybars Örsek says. “We are just presenting facts and comparing them with statements by political actors.”

Problems arise when official facts cannot be trusted – a rare scenario in the UK, less so in Turkey – in which case Dogruluk Payi would point out the problem in its fact-check and turn to international sources. Sometimes, Örsek says, data is simply nowhere to be found – a common occurrence with military operations in Syria, for instance.

Laura Zommer, executive director of Argentinian fact-checking venture Chequeado, also has to deal with elusive data. Argentina’s National Institute of Statistics stopped publishing crime and poverty figures between 2009 and 2015. “They just decided not to publish those figures, because they were not necessarily good news,” she says. For the occasion, the outfit coined a new label – insostenible or “unsustainable” – to designate politicians’ statements that cannot be verified with existing data.

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As Argentina braces itself for a general election in October 2019, the situation is compounded by the rise of disinformation websites. Chequeado hopes new technological tools and partnerships with larger media outlets will let her reach the widest possible audience. Its goal has not changed in eight years. “We want to increase the cost of lying,” Zommer says.

ILLUSTRATION: ADAM SIMPSON

Will Moy says he decided to launch Full Fact after working in the House of Lords. Moy, 34, explains how in 2007, he was working as a 23-year-old assistant for crossbencher peer Colin Low. Like all politicians, Lord Low received cartfuls of briefings, reports and evidence from lobbying organisations, think tanks, charities and pressure groups trying to influence lawmakers.

“Some was complete nonsense,” Moy says. “And some of that nonsense was being picked up by important people trying to make important decisions. And that was very frustrating – seeing how bad information can lead to bad decisions that people would have not made if they’d had good-quality information.”

Two years earlier, journalist and commentator Peter Oborne had published The Rise of Political Lying, a book in which he took aim at politicians’ and spin doctors’ complicated relationship with accuracy, and proposed the creation of “a body to bring back integrity to the political process by monitoring the statements of politicians of all parties” – mentioning FactCheck.org as a model.

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Moy was convinced that he could build such a body, and pitched the idea to parliamentarians and political journalists. “They immediately said, ‘This sounds like an important thing to do’. You don’t get that speed of response from those kinds of people unless they mean it,” he says.

The project secured funding from Michael Samuel, a former Conservative Party donor, and from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, a left-leaning organisation with no party affiliation. In early 2010, Full Fact set up an office above a sex shop in Soho. Since then, it has been through three general elections and three referendums, has partnered with newspapers, radio and TV, and averages 309,000 unique visitors per month.

From the beginning, Full Fact was at pains to establish its non-partisanship: “Our work is only valuable as long as people trust us,” Moy says. For that reason, Full Fact has its strategic directions set by a board of trustees including representatives from various parties, and on both sides of the Brexit debate. And, in order not to appear beholden to anyone in particular, it takes funding from several different sources: from individual crowdfunders, to charitable trusts (among which are the Nuffield Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Open Society Foundations), to corporations – Facebook and Google both donated to Full Fact in 2017 to fund specific projects; altogether their donations amounted to a quarter of Full Fact’s total income of £956,000.

Full Fact claims to equitably check statements from every party that secured over one per cent of the vote; it also monitors the media, taking editors to task if their stories contains falsehoods. The language used in its fact-checks is finely calibrated: you will not find “Tory” (a derogatory word originating from “highwayman”, although many Conservatives have embraced it), nor “reform” (implicitly connoting a positive change). And you will never, ever read a Full Fact piece stating that somebody intentionally lied. “We check claims, not people,” O’Leary says. “You’ll never see us say that someone is lying. Because we can never prove intent.” (On this, Full Fact is at one with FactCheck.org, less so with The Washington Post, whose Fact Checker blog is personified by a culpably insincere Italian puppet named Pinocchio.)

Non-partisanship is also ensured via recruitment. Deftness at Microsoft Excel, command of current affairs and a well-developed bullshit detector – the ability to understand, for instance, that classic politico brag “record numbers are in employment” is less impressive once you consider that Britain’s population is also at a record high – are all key skills. But somebody who has extreme or militant views, and who can’t check them at the door, will never make it on to the team.

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“When we recruit people we test if they’re able to see the other side of the argument, how visceral their reactions are to a government’s policies,” says Phoebe Arnold, Full Fact’s head of communications and impact. (Arnold left Full Fact in June 2018.) “We ask them, ‘What is austerity?’ And if they go, ‘Oh, it’s this awful Tory policy’, we’d ask them to describe it and then we’d ask, ‘Why is it necessary?’ If they can’t explain it from a conservative viewpoint we’d be worried about their ability to stay neutral and see different facets of an argument.”

People who do get in have to sign a declaration of personal interest revealing membership of a political party, or involvement in large companies likely to be fact-checked. As long as they work for Full Fact, they are not allowed to express any opinion on “matters of political controversies,” in public or in the office. The curious outcome is an organisation chock-full with political junkies with no apparent opinion on politics, unless it can be backed up with available data.

“We employ nice people and we establish the rules from day one,” says O’Leary. “We keep the culture very tight.”

ILLUSTRATION: ADAM SIMPSON

Full Fact’s digital product manager Mevan Babakar opens her laptop and mutes her ever-pinging smartphone. “What do you know about automated fact-checking?” she asks. A bioengineer by training, Babakar is in charge of developing digital tools that could allow Full Fact to check more claims, more quickly. Babakar and her team’s live transcription claim-spotter (which I saw in action during PMQ) is still pretty rudimentary software: all it does is match BBC subtitles against the group’s database of fact-checks. But soon it will gain the ability to analyse claims and automatically retrieve the pertinent primary data from the Office of National Statistics’ API.

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Babakar’s second tool is called “trends”. “It captures information from TV, social media, Parliamentary records, newspapers – it looks for claims we have already fact-checked and looks at who’s spreading it,” she explains. “The idea is that it will help us getting corrections.”

Full Fact’s love for corrections sets it apart from many other fact-checking groups. Most organisations just publish their fact-checks, naming and shaming the person who made the claim. Full Fact takes the extra step of requesting official corrections. Politicians, including former Prime Minister David Cameron, have rectified their statements after Full Fact called them out. And Moy says that Full Fact’s dedication has helped change how newspapers make corrections.

“In 2010, a story on special education came out that had been wildly misunderstood by most newspapers and broadcasters: we fact-checked it and then asked them to correct the record,” he says.

“It was almost the first time some newspapers had been asked to correct a matter of accuracy by a third party. That was an important precedent.” Moy would later give evidence on the matter before the Leveson Inquiry on press ethics; he says that afterwards, the Daily Mail and The Sun launched their corrections columns.

In order to work, correction requests need to happen quickly – problematic, given that fact-checking a claim takes longer than making it. Moy discovered this law during the EU Referendum campaign in 2016: the notorious pledge that the UK paid the EU £350 million every week, money that could be spent on the NHS. Full Fact checked the claim and requested a correction, but it was not quick enough: the claim stuck around.

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“You have to get in before people are so committed to a claim that they can’t back out,” says Moy. “By the time they’ve tied their political reputation very closely to one specific claim, it’s harder for them to correct it, even if it’s wrong.”

The third tool Babakar shows me (dubbed Robochecking), is a sort of “Shazam for facts”: software that would use speech recognition to detect when someone makes a claim, and fact-checks them on the spot. So, if somebody said that GDP is rising, the software would promptly retrieve a chart showing how GDP has been trending of late. Full Fact plans to give this and the other tools to “the wider community” – which Babakar stresses as fact-checkers (Full Fact is already collaborating with Chequeado and African organisation Africa Check), journalists, and others interviewing politicians.

“I don’t think we will apply this to any pub conversation,” she assures. “I am not building a bot that tells anyone in the world that they are wrong. That’s not how you make friends.”

ILLUSTRATION: ADAM SIMPSON

The double whammy of Brexit and Trump’s eventful presidency have persuaded many that inaccurate claims can actually harm a country’s political life. Now, many feel that the world needs fact-checkers as never before. On the other hand, much of the attention has been on so-called “fake news”, a label Full Fact finds flawed. “We are not super impressed by the term ‘fake news’,” says Arnold. “It’s obviously used by people like [Rodrigo] Duterte [president of the Philippines] or Trump to criticise legitimate media criticism. It also covers a whole range of issues in an unhelpful way.”

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One of the walls of the meeting room where we are talking is half-covered in yellow, pink and blue Post-Its detailing all the fake news-related questions Full Fact has been asked so far – from “dark ads” to “political actors bypassing media” to “bots”. The group is collaborating with the Cabinet Office and with the European Commission on strategies for countering misinformation.

There are many facets to the “fake news” story. One has to do with dark adverts: political messages posted on social media, set to be visible only to select audiences. Dominic Cummings, the director of Brexit-backing Vote Leave campaign, revealed that it had deployed “about one billion targeted digital adverts” in the ten weeks leading up to the vote. “That’s just massive,” Moy says. “And we don’t know what the equivalent number is for the Remain campaign at all.”

One problem with targeted ads is that they cannot be easily fact-checked, as they are not visible to people who are not supposed to see them. Another issue – one that has cropped up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal – is that targeted ads bring “dog-whistling” to an entirely new level. A campaign might use dark ads to send radically different messages to different cohorts, becoming a million things to a million voters. “That’s very worrying for an election where we are all meant to be equal voters with an equal voice,” Moy says.

To counter this, Full Fact is pushing for regulation: politicians should be required to always write their names and addresses on online ads – as they must do with campaign flyers and billboards. A corollary of that rule is that parties should make all their online adverts public, allowing voters to grasp the full picture of what a campaign stands for.

Another aspect of disinformation is the diffusion of unsubstantiated, mistaken or deliberately false claims on social media. It is the “Russian propaganda” problem, but it may also be ordinary people sharing hyper-partisan memes. The emerging of this trend has forced Full Fact to think about updating their real-world-focused model.

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“In the past, we mostly checked claims by politicians, the media and pressure groups,” Arnold says. “Now, we need to be thinking about what inaccurate or unsubstantiated information is on the internet that we might need to check. It’s not just about Parliament and the media anymore. It’s about what is happening on Facebook groups about immigration, or the economy, or whatever.”

During the 2017 general election campaign, Full Fact teamed up with anti-misinformation group First Draft to spot and verify viral online content. In some cases, they rebutted inaccurate memes by creating counter-memes. Given the number of inaccurate memes circulating online, and the time it takes to debunk them – it took Full Fact three days to fact-check a particularly sticky memeon the state of the economy. This is not a battle fact-checkers can fight alone, Arnold says. Internet platforms, traditional media and governments will all have to play a role.

Alphabet and Facebook have publicly claimed that they would remove fake news from the web. In 2016, Alphabet’s Google Digital News Initiative awarded Full Fact funds to develop its automated fact-checking prototypes, and Facebook has repeatedly partnered with the organisation for anti-disinformation projects. Mark Zuckerberg’s social network has been hit hard with the accusation of being a passive platform for the spread of conspiracy theories, propaganda and malicious lies.

It was a problem that Facebook had begun wrestling with immediately after the US presidential election: in December 2016, it kick-started an algorithmically-driven purge of thousands of fake accounts, and inaugurated a partnership with several fact-checkers tasked with verifying news stories and posts reported as suspicious. If a story fails the fact-checkers’ test, it will be made less visible on users’ feeds, and shown alongside fact-checking articles.

According to Zuckerberg’s recent statements, one technology destined to gain more prominence in Facebook’s anti-fake armoury is AI. Facebook is using inputs from fact-checkers to train machine-learning software to recognise the hallmarks of false news stories – from geographical provenance, to poor spelling to general sentiment.

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As Facebook itself acknowledged, however, AI might help speed up human fact-checkers’ work, but we are nowhere close to building an effective AI fact-checker. “Techniques analogous to spam filtering won’t go very far to eliminate the majority of more sophisticated fake news stories, where fabricated facts are presented in a seemingly credible way,” says Dean Pomerleau, a professor at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, and one of the organisers of the Fake News Challenge, a worldwide competition for projects harnessing AI to fight disinformation.

A classic and relatively innocuous example, according to Pomerleau, was the claim that the size of the crowd at Trump’s inauguration ceremony was bigger than Obama’s. “To debunk these kinds of stories requires a subtle analysis of a story’s content, plus the hard work of actual fact checking,” Pomerlau explains. “This isn’t the kind of thing artificial intelligence is going to be able to tackle any time soon, since it requires rich semantic understanding of how the world works, where to look for corroborating evidence, and talking with sources.”

On the other hand, AI already gets right some aspects of fact-checking. It is capable of understanding identical claims expressed differently, which could help reduce the amount of time fact-checkers spend looking at multiple misinformation articles all pushing the same narrative. “This shows how a synergy between humans and AI can work effectively,” Pomerlau says.

It remains to be seen how falsehood-peddlers will adapt to internet platforms’ automated filters. “There’s going to be an arms race between real news and fake news, where AI is used to both generate as well as detect fake news,” says Anjana Susarla, associated professor of accounting and information systems at Michigan State University.

How the UK's fake news inquiry waged a war on disinformation Russia How the UK's fake news inquiry waged a war on disinformation

The really nagging question about the fake news conundrum is whether fact-checking makes any difference. In the past, political fact-checking had seemed able to modify politicians’ conduct. According to Boston University’s Michelle Amazeen, this has now stopped working with Trump – with the lone exception of his backtracking from the assertion that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. But fact-immune politicians presuppose fact-indifferent audiences. Political fabulists exist as long as they are able to cater to partisan supporters. That is why, Arnold says, fact-checkers need to tackle the root causes of political tribalism. They have to understand how one would convince an ultra-Trumpist, or a hardcore Brexiteer, or a firebrand Corbynista, that something is true, even if it looks bad for their political faction.

Researchers at Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab, chaired by the founder of Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact, Bill Adair, are trying to solve that puzzle. In September 2017, they launched Tech & Check, a two-year initiative bringing together technologists and journalists. Tech & Check uses algorithms to identify claims for fact-checkers to verify, or even provide real-time fact-checking during televised events. The goal, Adair says, is to whittle down the double “fact-checking gap”: the gap in time between an audience hearing a claim and reading a correction; and the gap in space, which requires people to search for a fact-check after hearing a claim on television.

“We are looking to get the fact-checks on to the same screens where claims are made,” he explains. “We want to get the fact-checks to viewers the moment they receive a political message.”

Tech & Check is also working on how to reach out to people who, when confronted with facts jarring with their political convictions, cling on their ideas even more strongly, in a psychological short-circuit political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have christened “backfire effect”. Technologist Dan Schultz wants to tackle this problem with an online plug-in called Truth Goggles.

“My idea was: how do we present partisan readers with credible information in a pill they’d be able, or willing, to swallow?” Schultz says. “The solution we have come up with, if done wrong, it’s creepy.” Prima facie, Truth Goggles is a tool for highlighting claims and providing pop-up fact-checks tailored to accommodate individual political leanings. To glean each reader’s ideas, Schultz envisions an explicit survey-like interface asking them about a range of issues.

On the basis of those answers, Truth Goggles would fine-tune its rhetoric – by avoiding, for example, calling a statement outright “false” if the reader is an overzealous fan of the politician who made it, or tweaking the wording so that it chimes with the reader’s world view. (Schultz says US gun owners prefer to call them “firearms.”)

“It should be the language of a buddy you like, but don’t always agree with,” Schultz says. He says to be aware that, in a post-Cambridge Analytica world, this kind of targeting looks suspicious, regardless of its goals. But he thinks that while targeted propaganda is designed to anger and hoodwink people, Truth Goggles would leverage empathy to help them look at facts with a clearer head.

“We called this Truth Goggles because we would provide you with ‘prescription lenses’ adapted to your personal vision issues – the biases we all have,” he says.

Full Fact is also turning to psychology, education and neuroscience to understand the role of emotions in information-processing, and refine the way it presents its fact-checks: its research and impact manager, Amy Sippitt, peruses reams of studies about how extreme partisans react to facts and verifications. It is too early to say whether any of this will work, or if the post-truth era is the new normal. Still, it’s a fight that Full Fact thinks is worth it. “Fact-checking is about giving power to the people,” Moy says. “Facts aren’t the end of political debate – they’re the start of it.”

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