Tuesday, March 21

Factchequeado is born, an initiative to fight disinformation in Spanish in the United States

Fight against disinformation in Spanish in the United States. This is the objective of Factchequeado, a project promoted by Maldita y Chequeado, with the support of the Google News Initiative, which seeks to build a community of Latinos and Spanish-speakers, promote alliances with fact-checking media and organizations, and generate its own verified content.

This new medium, which is presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism held in Austin (Texas), will track the disinformation circulating on social networks and in the traditional press “to help citizens know if the content they receive is truthful, false, based on little or no evidence, or lack context. It will also seek to “offer a training space in fact-checking for Hispanic journalists, experiment with new formats and technologies, and provide a database to promote academic research,” says Maldita.

“The project arises from misinformation during the pandemic and is reinforced by what we have seen during the war in Russia and Ukraine. We have realized that disinformation in Spanish is a silk route of hoaxes, which move in all directions in Spain, Latin America and the US Latino community. The great misinformers act globally on issues such as science or migration”, says Julio Montes, director and co-founder of Maldita.es. “Speaking with Chequeado, we realized that we had the same problems and we wondered if something similar was happening in Latino communities in the United States.”

One of the pillars of the project, says Montes, is the listening process: “We not only want to hear everything related to misinformation, but also about the doubts that arise in a community about different issues that affect them: from vaccines to visas. . To address the Latino communities and have them listen to you, you have to talk to them about their problems.”

Factchequeado has already presented its first alliances with large media such as Telemundo, Politifact or Univision (El Detector). Also with other factchecking companies such as FactCheck.organd with small newsrooms, such as MediaWise, Enlace Latino, DocumentedNY or Conexión Migrante.





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