By Jeff Horwitz
There is no coronavirus vaccine available for dogs being
withheld from humans.
It isn't necessary to close your windows because military
helicopters will start spraying disinfectant.
And baby-formula manufacturers aren't sending freebies to people
who call their customer hotlines.
These are among the viral social-media memes debunked by Lead
Stories, a fact-checking site co-founded by Los Angeles
entrepreneur Alan Duke.
At a moment when there are global scarcities for items as
diverse as toilet paper and ventilators, Mr. Duke offers something
else in short supply: fact checking.
The former CNN producer's company, Lead Stories, helps Facebook
Inc. and other social-media platforms limit the spread of
virus-related misinformation by flagging it as false. Business is
booming, thanks to a surge of posts that are both dangerous and
harder to track than many other forms of what is known as fake
news.
The claims that Lead Stories debunks are then labeled as false
on Facebook, which limits their spread and links to Lead Stories'
reviews. A staffer combs the platform looking to identify and label
duplicates that spring up.
Already ramping up with funding from Facebook to combat
misinformation in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Mr. Duke and
others in the industry have pivoted to coronavirus almost
full-time.
"We've maxxed out all our goals for the month," he said halfway
through March, referring to the company's contractual targets for
Facebook fact-check volumes. Lead Stories continues to review
Facebook and Instagram content, and review material from Twitter,
YouTube and other platforms that don't pay it, posting fact checks
to its own site. Since its first coronavirus fact check in
mid-January, Lead Stories has fact checked more than 200 viral
coronavirus claims.
Other fact checkers have become similarly focused, organizing an
ad-hoc international task force to identify misinformation that has
hopped national borders and languages as quickly as the virus
itself.
Lead Stories has traditionally battled political publishers and
for-profit hoaxers in places ranging from the U.S. to Macedonia and
Pakistan. While many coronavirus posts carry international content
-- the meme warning of military disinfectant drops appeared in
Europe and elsewhere -- they generally appear to be noncommercial,
produced by pranksters or people promoting misguided home remedies,
Mr. Duke said.
Such apparently organic content also coexists with ideologically
driven falsehoods, such as the claim that "60 Democrats" in the
U.S. Senate blocked coronavirus relief payments to Americans.
The content is often memes and images rather than purported news
stories. And where Lead Stories has become used to complaints from
the publishers of stories it rated as false, it now hears from
regular users upset that it has debunked a meme they shared.
"Sharing this stuff is how people connect to their friends and
co-workers," Mr. Duke said. "It's embarrassing when it shows up in
their timeline that they shared something that's wrong. That's not
something we've been through before with fact checking -- this is
much more personal."
As is common with Facebook's 56 global fact-checking partners,
Lead Stories was launched with independent funding but has
sustained itself in part with Facebook money. The tech giant
started the fact-checking program in late 2016 after criticism of
how it handled misinformation during the 2016 presidential race.
But human fact checkers remain central to Facebook's defenses, and
even before the coronavirus pandemic the company was ramping up its
investments.
Mr. Duke declined to say by how much money Facebook is paying
Lead Stories, but said it was a multiple of the $359,000 it earned
under its 2019 contract.
Mr. Duke and his co-founder Maarten Schenk, who works from his
home in Belgium, were the company's sole full-time employees until
last November, when Facebook told U.S.-based fact-checking partners
that it would bankroll a sharp expansion of their work ahead of the
2020 presidential election.
"Fighting misinformation isn't something one company can do
alone," said Campbell Brown, head of news partnerships at Facebook.
"The more the industry is sharing best practices and companies are
learning from each other, the better the outcomes will be for
people."
The funding let Lead Stories increase hiring. It now has 10
full-time employees and six part-time fact checkers, mostly former
CNN employees. Mr. Duke said it pays "on par" with the network's
six-figure salaries in some instances.
Facebook funds about half of the international publishers and
fact-checking organizations that are part of a coronavirus-specific
fact-checking alliance coordinated by the Poynter Institute's
International Fact-Checking Network.
"We were here before Facebook started working with us," said
Cristina Tardáguila, the IFCN's associate director, of the fact
checkers. "But there is no other program like this."
That might change. In January, video-sharing app TikTok said it
would begin reviewing user reports of misinformation with a
U.S.-based moderation staff, and that it was working with
third-party groups.
A reporter, editor, producer and special-projects manager at CNN
for 26 years, Mr. Duke was doing celebrity-focused profiles and
investigations out in Los Angeles when he resigned in 2014. He
spent five months working for the National Enquirer's parent
company before quitting to co-found Lead Stories.
The work can be rough, Mr. Duke said, with one employee quitting
after learning about the frequency that Lead Stories' reporters and
editors have received threats from people they fact check.
Staffers consult public-health guidance and identify entities
with expertise or firsthand knowledge about specific rumors. To
debunk the meme about free pandemic-time baby formula, for example,
Lead Stories reporters spoke with numerous manufacturers.
The company reviews a tiny fraction of the billions of
social-media posts produced each day. It uses a tool built by Mr.
Schenk, called Trendolizer, that tracks posts on the cusp of
spreading rapidly. Facebook also gives its fact-checking partners a
queue of posts that are suspicious or have already been flagged by
users.
Lead Stories' traffic is up nearly 10-fold, Mr. Duke said, with
about 8,000 users reading its reviews at any given time -- a number
that reflects how Facebook slows the spread of posts that it labels
as inaccurate.
Write to Jeff Horwitz at Jeff.Horwitz@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 30, 2020 11:14 ET (15:14 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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