A Digital Fact-Checker Fights Fake News

For seven years, Storyful, a social media researcher in Dublin, has consulted for news outlets such as ABC and the Wall Street Journal, using a small team of reporters to try to keep those operations from embarrassing themselves online. Mostly, that’s meant fact-checking viral media in real time, making sure a video floating around Twitter really shows, say, the latest barrel bomb explosion in Aleppo—rather than a roadside bomb in Homs—before it goes into a client’s breaking-news post.

Since Election Day, the team’s strategy has become more complicated. “Fake news has dominated 90 percent of our conversations,” says Storyful Chief Executive Officer Rahul Chopra. While Facebook and Twitter denied, then grudgingly acknowledged, the role they played in spreading newsy-looking lies during the crucial final weeks of the presidential campaign, Chopra’s staff focused on ways to debunk false items.