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Correcting the record
FACT-CHECKING and combating misinformation - on everything from covid data to Johnsonian employment figures - was the theme of September's London Freelance Branch meeting. Our speaker was Steve Nowottny, editor at independent UK fact-checking charity Full Fact. Although Steve's a longstanding NUJ member, he said it was his first Branch meeting.
Steve Nowottny speaks to LFB via Zoom
A journalist for almost 20 years, starting out on an Alabama local newspaper, Steve has worked for a magazine for GPs, then for Martin Lewis's MoneySavingExpert website, before "I moved to Full Fact - "a bit of a shift for me - it feels like a very different kind of journalism".
Describing Full Fact and its work, Steve noted that it wasn't always a charity. It was launched in 2010 by a cross-party group of trustees including politicians and supporters from major parties, plus others who are not politicians at all.
How's it funded? Some money comes through individuals giving, for example, £10 each month. There are corporate donations, and charitable trusts. Full Fact is also paid for fact-checking services - it has a contract with Meta, owners of Facebook. It also provides training. It has an office in Vauxhall but has "embraced remote working" and "has workers all over the UK."
There are currently eight people working in editorial at Full Fact. They're about to take on more journalists to cover "health misinformation" and hope to have a doctor on their staff, as they have had previously. There are a few in editorial who "don’t have a journalistic background" - one on the team has worked in the civil service
The main focus of Full Fact's fact checking is claims by politicians, or claims in the mainstream media or on social media. It does extend beyond that - for example to adverts in local newspapers.
Health is also a focus, as are "self-selecting surveys" and "scientific stuff that shows correlation not causation." Full Fact concentrates on "specific claims" - it does not "fact check opinion" and prefers to prioritise what is "relevant and interesting".
Steve said that his team "will not talk about people 'lying': we check the accuracy of a claim rather than the motive behind it... What matters is the detail of the claims that we are checking."
There are areas that Full Fact "steers clear of", for now: "we don't feel qualified to check Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland politics" or to verify claims about climate change either. "We don't feel we have the expertise to do a good, impartial and scientifically-valid" job of climate change, for the moment. Occasionally "fact-checkers do get it wrong. Full Fact gets it wrong, I'm sure" once in a while.
Fact-checking goes live
Full Fact recently restarted live fact-checking in real time for the various televised hustings in the recent Conservative leadership contest. Some of this fact-checking fed straight into the Sky News blog, and some was fed to the journalists in the studio.
But "we don't just publish - we act," Steve says. As well as correcting claims, Full Fact has an Interventions Manager who follows up after a fact-check by pressing for corrections. They have recently launched a log of uncorrected claims from MPs in order to persuade them to correct the record.
Steve Nowottny speaks to LFB via Zoom
Full Fact has also produced a guide to how its readers can learn to fact-check for themselves images allegedly coming out of Ukraine, including details of how reverse image searches work. This is a response to numerous images online that were of other conflicts or even featured "computer game footage passed off as Russian attacks - imagery that was inaccurate".
Johnsonian employment assertions
One claim repeatedly made by Alexander de Pfeffel "Boris" Johnson since last November is that about the total number of people in employment being higher than it was before the pandemic. It is true that there are more workers on payroll - those on Pay As You Earn (PAYE) with deductions at source - than pre-covid. But the number of self-employed people is down - and so is the total number in paid work. This "straightforward" inaccuracy has "proven very hard to correct," says Steve.
Full Fact wrote to the then Prime Minister. The Director General of the Office of Statistics Regulation and the Chair of the UK Statistics Authority also sent letters about the issue. Johnson was eventually challenged by MPs in the Liaison Committee - the Committee of Select Committee Chairs. He admitted to them that he'd been using the statistic incorrectly and told them he was in the process of correcting the record. Steve confirmed to the Freelance that at the time of writing it's still not officially corrected.
Steve notes that his team regularly check claims made by Johnson and counter-claims made by the Labour Party and sometimes finds that Johnson is correct.
Other recent Full Fact stories? Labour's proposed cost-of-living-crisis plans for energy bills (announced before current Prime Minister Liz Truss announced hers) were not "fully costed" as they "didn't factor in higher energy usage in winter," Full Fact's investigation found. Steve admits that "our understanding of energy prices is not what it could be". It's a "new area of expertise... there is also an area of understanding with stuff like covid that is new."
Health disinformation
Full Fact also tracked "claims made about government data" on the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) web pages. The UKHSA covid vaccines data was being "taken out of context" and used to support claims that "were simply not true". The UKHSA made their wording on this clearer after action from Full Fact and others.
Another subject of Full Fact investigation was claims about how many patients in intensive care units during covid were unvaccinated. Full Fact's reputation for impartiality ensured that on this story they got "access because of who were are" to talk to experts.
The phenomenon of claims about the number of children who have died of covid is an example of a claim Full Fact checked that overstated the risk of covid. Covid fact-checking is complicated by the fact that "there are so many different metrics of what counts as a covid death," such as whether - and where - the word "covid" features on a death certificate.
Many of these stories were made possible with support from Artificial Intelligence (AI) used as a monitoring tool, to "scan for misleading claims", to identify "where these are being made" and to spot "interesting things to check". Put together by Full Fact's team of "extremely smart techies", these AI tools can very quickly "scan a huge number of outlets" to see where dodgy assertions are emerging across a lot of social media and mainstream media outlets. Full Fact's AI tools are designed to help teams of human fact checkers monitor and challenge more claims, rather than replace those teams.
Chemtrails, monkeypox...
Some "very daft claims that are very easily checked" include so-called "chemtrails" and conspiracy theories about monkeypox. Steve says his team's mission is to focus on checking the accuracy of the dodgy assertions being made rather than trying to work out their origin or motivation.
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