Chequeabot: Investing in technology for preventing the spread of misinformation

In the last decade, the dissemination of misinformation and its propagation for political or economical purposes has become a central issue for democratic discourse. This entails serious consequences, including an increase in levels of intolerance and political incivility, as well as heightened polarization, among others. This issue intertwines with both economic and political themes as it impacts the functioning of democratic systems and societal cohesion. The spread of fake news can influence public opinion, shape policy agendas, and affect economic stability by eroding trust in institutions and exacerbating social divisions. Therefore, addressing this phenomenon is not only a matter of safeguarding democratic principles but also crucial for maintaining economic resilience and political stability. 

Fact-checking emphasizes the need to have evidence-based information accessible to all to make informed decisions, not only about politics but also regarding people’s welfare, economy, and health. 

Additionally, fact-checking organizations face limited time and resources to quickly respond to the large volume of misinformation circulating in their country. It's crucial to reduce this time gap because there is evidence that intervening with debunking at the right moment is key to the success of fact-checking strategies. 

Finally, many fact-checking organizations in the region have limitations in both resources and the necessary tools to identify and comprehensively monitor the emergence of misinformation, as well as to real-time record data and information associated with misinformation. Fact-checking helps to decrease the spread of misinformation, that is, it reduces its reach. This also demonstrates the importance of reacting in a timely manner, as the results can vary greatly depending on how long it takes to fact-check.

Chequeabot is a service platform for fact-checkers based on artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning and open data. Chequeabot helps journalists and fact-checking organizations to speed up the fact-checking process, reducing the time it takes to monitor misinformation and public speech and produce new fact-checks and debunks The tool allows newsrooms to use their time more efficiently, allowing them to have more time to search for reliable information, consult sources, gather context and analyze data, while delegating the operational task to the technology. 

Our current technological platform consists of 5 applications designed to classify and analyze information quickly, through a modern and intuitive interface that facilitates its access and use. Each application was born out of a necessity to speed up one or more of the steps of the fact-checking process, and addresses a particular need in our fact-checking newsroom. Chequeabot uses AI and machine learning to do complex tasks such as claim detection, claim matching, summarization, live audio transcription and more. 

Chequeabot also features an application that provides live feeds from various social networks integrated into a single dashboard, allowing classification and sorting of relevant information, as well as creating records of misinformation for later analysis, verification, and publication. All this information is integrated into a structured database, which not only records the verifications performed but also the process, sources, and contents. This allows fact-checking organizations to conduct more thorough analysis and investigations and find connections between different applications. 

The target population are Spanish speaking journalists, fact-checking organizations of Latin America and Latino´s fact-checking organizations in the United States, who will be able to use the Chequeabot for free for their own work and research, using less time, guaranteeing a more transparent, accurate and independent journalism and increasing their impact. Through the LatamChequea network, Chequeado has the opportunity to share this technology with over 41 fact-checking organizations in Latin America and with Factchequeado, who counts with 74 media allies in 21 states (+ Puerto Rico) in the United States.

Nowadays, fact-checkers have limitations in both resources and the handling of necessary technological tools to thoroughly identify and monitor the emergence of misinformation, as well as to real-time record data and information associated with misinformation that are key for the analysis of its circulation.

Latin American citizens and Latino´s communities living in the United States will mainly benefit from this technological development, as they will be able to quickly access data and verified information on the main issues on the public agenda, in an attractive and easily accessible format. Eventually, this will strengthen citizen participation, government transparency, and the democratic institutions of the countries of the region. 

Our solution empowers fact-checkers with limited resources to improve the accuracy and reliability of information available to the public, ultimately contributing to a more informed society. The main idea is to continue working to take fact-checking a step forward and reduce the time gap between the circulation of misinformation and the verification process, exploring the possibility of a faster strategy, given that there is evidence that intervening with debunking at the right moment is key to the success of fact-checking strategy. 

Founded in 2010, Chequeado is the first fact-checking initiative in Latin America and the Global South which works to improve the quality of the public debate, strengthen the democratic system and encourage civic participation based on data journalism, education and innovation. Since its beginnings, it has worked to foment, expand and reinforce the fact-checking movement in Latin America through technological in-house developments , with the support of initiatives like the Google AI Impact Challenge, and grants provided from organizations like National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the Internet Society Foundation (ISOC) to develop our tools and share them with other fact-checkers across the world.Moreover, every product that Chequeado develops is done with open source code with the aim of contributing to its replicability in the region. In addition it actively seeks to provide technology transfer and training to other fact-checking and journalism organizations in the region, promoting the implementation of new technologies and fostering innovation. Apart from being a fact-checking organization ourselves, which means we have an unparalleled insight into the needs and requirements of organizations such as ourselves, we also work in tight collaboration with other organizations across the region. As an example, Chequeado leads Latamchequea, the network of fact-checkers from across Latin America, the United States, Spain, and Portugal, which started in 2014 as an in-person meeting and currently brings together 41 media outlets from 19 countries. The objective of this network, created and led by Chequeado, is to share experiences and tools that contribute to improving the quality of public debate and to foster collaboration between diverse media outlets in the region to increase the impact of fact-checking and the fight against misinformation in our continent.

Moving on, Chequeado´s main innovation project is Chequeabot, the fact-checking automation platform, powered by AI and Natural Language Processing. Chequeabot is currently being used by more than 10 fact-checking organizations from other countries of the region (Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, Colombia and Bolivia). 

In 2015, Chequeado won the 2015 Gabriel García Márquez Award – Innovation Category awarded by the New Ibero-American Journalism Foundation (FNPI). In addition, the organization has a team of back end and front end developers, which are specialized in issues of transparency, citizen participation, civic technology and open data. 

For Chequeado, technological tools not only represent milestones in our evolution but also empower us to carry out fact-checking processes more efficiently and quickly. Consequently, our goal is to continue exploring and applying the latest innovations in technology to strengthen the work of fact-checking organizations by providing them with knowledge, mentorship, and access to innovative tools that will facilitate faster and more efficient detection of misinformation.

Since the creation of Chequeabot, we have incrementally expanded its abilities, adding and refining multiple tools and sharing them with up to 13 different fact-checking organizations for them to use and benefit from, both from Latin American countries, but also from Spain and the United State. Throughout this process we have been gathering feedback  and improving the service we provide. 

One of the tools we have built is a live transcription application (called Transcripción en vivo) where fact-checkers can follow live any relevant political event and get an instant and high quality transcription with highlighted fact-checkable claims and also with connections to claims that have been verified before. This tool has been used in Chequeado for more than 10 live coverages, and also exported to Brazil and Spain where other colleagues have improved their live fact-checking capabilities thanks to the usage of the tool. 

Another tool we have built and tested is a dashboard that provides relevant claims from political figures to fact-check. The claims are automatically retrieved and classified, and they come from multiple sources such as news outlets, X (former Twitter) accounts , TV interviews and political shows and presidential speeches and legislative sessions. 50% of claims that are fact-checked in Chequeado are provided by this application, which helps to save up a lot of hours of monitoring. This tool is also used by 5 other organizations in Latin America.

We’ve also developed a monitoring tool to track misinformation spreading in social media, which is used by 7 organizations in Latin America and the US; a tool to transcribe YouTube videos that is open to our community and has 3+ million users annually; a Whatsapp administrator to help us deal with a high-volume of fact-check requests that come into our newsroom; an application that automatically listens, transcribes and categorizes podcasts and audio shows to save fact-checkers hundreds of hours and was funded and used by a fact-checking organization in Spain; and a tool to automatically detect fact-checkable claims in any corpus of text.

The rate at which technology is advancing means both an incredible opportunity and a significant challenge for our organization. Although the changes we’ve seen in the artificial intelligence landscape since we started working on Chequeabot in 2018 have been substantial, nothing compares to the latest boom of AI involving LLMs and Generative AI. It is now a critical time to put these technologies in the hands of underfunded and understaffed organizations, but doing this requires not only funding but also collaboration. 

By becoming an MIT Solver, Chequeado would be able to tap into the Solve’s network and support to develop more and better innovative tools for combating misinformation, and to integrate the technological breakthroughs into  our Chequeabot. Both Chequeado ́s commitment and the potential of becoming an MIT Solver share the goal of increasing peace, prosperity and strengthening democracies by preventing the spread of misinformation. Since its foundation, one of Chequeado´s pillars has been, and the strong commitment to finding ways in which technology can improve fact-checking efficiency, reach and impact.

The possibility of reaching out and getting to know different leaders of MIT's network across industries and sectors, specially technologic and media ones, will open great doors to Chequeado, not only for new funding opportunities but also new knowledge and experiences that we would otherwise not be able to access. Moreover, the opportunity to participate in a 9 month virtual support program will give the possibility of gaining new acknowledgement in softwares and technologies, leadership and management support in the project and the innovative field. Finally, letting Chequeado participate in different conferences and media will be incredible and very useful in getting to show and get to know Chequeado´s work and expertise in the fact-checking field. 

In Latin America, there has been a notable absence of accessible and affordable tools tailored to the fact-checking process available in Spanish. . Additionally, technological tools designed for fact-checking are often not readily accessible to organizations due to their complex and resource-intensive nature. The ability to harness the disruptive technological innovations that have taken place over the last few years to optimize and provide fact-checkers with a more powerful set of tools to fight misinformation and disinformation is a key part of our work and objective, and it is what we’ve working to achieve with Chequeabot. Our solution has the potential to hugely improve the performance of fact-checkers and increase their capabilities to respond in shorter times and more effectively to misinforming narratives and do it in a way that is sustainable, affordable and specially tailored to each organization's needs.

This project is unique in the world, as there is no other project with such a direct impact on Spanish-speaking fact-checking communities.. This is particularly worrying given that platforms still have great difficulties in combating disinformation that arise in English and are later translated to other languages. Even though Spanish is not a minority language, the differences and lack of attention to the specific problems of the countries of the region by major platforms make them specially vulnerable. As a result, it is urgent to develop technological solutions that, based on what has been already developed in English, focuses on disinformation that circulates in Spanish and that provide journalists with tools to detect and combat it faster and more efficiently. Furthermore, our project will be based on open source technology, which will allow its replicability and scalability to other Latin American countries.

Until now, these types of tools work separately and in English. What we are looking for with the Chequeabot is that fact-checking organizations in Spanish-speaking countries can monitor everything that is happening on the Internet from one place. Instead of entering the web page of each media outlet or analyzing separately what is circulating on each platform, the Chequeabot will scan this information for them and bring them the phrases that are checkable, in addition to indicating which of those claims have been previously checked. by the newsroom.

Furthermore, our approach is not solely based on internal expertise; we actively engage in collaborative efforts with other fact-checking organizations throughout the region. By pooling our collective experiences and insights, we are able to create a robust framework that benefits from diverse perspectives and methodologies. This collaborative process strengthens the entire fact-checking ecosystem and enhances our collective ability to combat misinformation effectively.

Our main Impact Goal for Chequeado´s Chequeabot is to significantly reduce the time dedicated by fact-checking organizations and to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of fact-checking efforts by providing a service platform to speed up the process of fact-checking in Spanish. Moreover, another impact goal would be to reach out to new organizations of fact-checking, not only in the region, but also fact-checking organizations of latinos currently living in the United States. Finally, to improve the overall quality and reliability of information available to the public, by minimizing the temporal gap between the emergence of misinformation and its verification and dissemination.

We will measure the progress and success of the Chequeabot, by collecting feedback from the organizations who used the platform,  through a pre-use and post-use survey of it.

Chequeabot relies on artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning and open data to help fact-checkers. Depending on the task, we use our own models trained on datasets we have built along the years or we make use of pre-trained open-source models deployed in our own infrastructure. For some particular tasks we also use services provided through APIs. Artificial Intelligence sits at the center of our product, as its key to solve complex tasks that require human-like intelligence and inference. This functionality is coated by an accessible, secure and user friendly web application were fact-checkers can login to interact with our solutions.

13 full-time

6 years

We are a team of 13 Latinos developers who are highly committed to creating technological solutions to increase fact checkers access to verified information. We have a development team composed of front and back end developers, a natural language processing and machine learning expert, a designer, product and project managers, and an expert on academic research, amongst others, that separates us from the rest of fact-checking organizations.  Despite several efforts worldwide, Latinos communities still remain underrepresented in tech jobs. Our products are being used daily in our own newsroom and in several organizations around Latin America (including Chile, Peru, Venezuela and Brazil, amongst others), and public products like the Desgrabador (chequeado.com/desgrabador) reach more than a million people yearly from more than 30 different countries. 

For that, we need more efforts to help Latinos and Latinas build their products by providing them access to new opportunities for training, funding, exposure and connections with each other and to big investors and companies. In this sense, we believe that this fund can be a great starting point to develop a system by Latinos and for Latinos, which will make visible the potential of AI to foster high-quality inclusive news and the capacity that Spanish-speaking media currently have to develop innovative products that better serve their audiences.

Moreover, we are thrilled to tell that we count with five women experts on the  members of this project. Women these days, and historically, have been a discriminated and excluded group in various projects and work spaces, including academic research and the programming and use of artificial intelligence (AI), for several reasons. This is why, from Chequeado, we encourage on having a diverse team, aiming for equality opportunities and diverse work teams.

Chequeado, founded in 2010, is part of Fundación La Voz Pública, a non-partisan and non-profit organization whose purpose is to improve public debate to strengthen the democratic system. Through its Media, Innovation, Education and Impact & Research programs, it seeks to improve public debate, develop antidotes to misinformation and raise the cost of lying. Chequeado is a certified member of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) hosted by Poynter Institute and has supported the development of dozens of fact-checking organizations in the region, both journalistically and institutionally. The organization has the support of hundreds of citizens, important companies with a presence in Argentina and abroad, and International Cooperation agencies. It has positioned itself as a leading transparent journalism organization in the region.

Our key resources and what makes us proud is:

- Our community, from which we gather data, feedback, and fact-check requests via social media and WhatsApp.

- Our transparency, both in our fact-checking methodology (including a correction policy) and in our funding sources and team composition.

- Our diversified funding strategy, which ensures editorial autonomy.

- Our diverse team of professionals, enthusiastic about innovation and fostering change.

 For more information about our financing, please visit the following website: https://chequeado.com/financia... 

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Founded in 2010, Chequeado is a non-partisan, non-profit and the first fact-checking organization in Latin America and the Global South. It works to improve the quality of the public debate, fight disinformation, strengthen the democratic system and encourage civic participation based on data journalism, education, research and innovation.

The organization has a team of more than 40 professionals divided into five areas of work: Media, in charge of website content and journalistic products based on discourse verification and data journalism; Innovation & Communication, responsible for exploring different narratives and ways of presenting information through technological developments and experimenting with different ways of sharing content and engaging with the community; Education, to strengthen the capabilities of journalists to use more reliable facts and data references and foster critical skills in citizens, with a particular focus on teenagers and seniors; Impact & New Initiatives, to carry out different researches and journalistic projects within the organization, including the LatamChequea network, as well as monitoring the evaluation and impact of the organization's projects; and Institutional Development, responsible for ensuring the autonomy and financial sustainability of the organization with a diversified funding model.

Chequeado is a certified member of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) hosted by Poynter Institute and has supported the development of dozens of fact-checking organizations in the region, both journalistically and institutionally. The organization has developed a solid, diversify and transparent funding strategy to ensure its independence and financial sustainability. Funds are derived from four sources: (1) Individual donors; (2) International cooperation agencies; (3) Corporate contributions; and (4) Universities and Civil Associations. Moreover, we have published our annual financial reports since our inception without interruption.

Throughout its years of work, Chequeado has had the support of a wide variety of international donors. Our financing policy is transparent and diversified with the aim of guaranteeing our sustainability and independence. All of our funders can be found on our website. We have received core grant support from Luminate and National Endowment for Democracy and received grants for the development of specific projects from Internet Society Foundation, Open Society and the International Fact-Checking Network. We also received funds from international organizations such as UNICEF, UNESCO, UNDP, PAHO. We also work with the support of local Embassies such as the United States Embassy, Canada Embassy and Switzerland Embassy, citizens and local companies.