5 Fact-Checking Tools For Checking Facts And Fake News
Misinformation is one of the many problems we have with online news portals. Mostly, the reason why they give out fake news is as a result of them being eager to break the news first or just to drive attention to their news portal.
These portals may see this as a normal thing but in actual sense, there are a lot of people who depend on these portals for their daily news stories.
Instead of these portals to take their time, research, and then fact check the story before they bring it out, they all ignore these processes and write the news the way they heard.
Due to the high rate of fake news in Ghana and the world at large, there are some online tools you can use to check facts and detect fake news.
5 Fact-Checking Tools For Checking Facts And Fake News
There are several fact-checking tools available on the internet. But, in this article, I am going to show you some 5 of them which have been tried and tested by many people all over the world.
Google Fact Check
Google as we all know is the biggest search engine in the world. As a result, almost everyone searches for their news and article from Google. This is the reason why Google has developed their personal fact-checking tool called Google Fact Check.
Google Fact Check is a feature introduced to Google search results which indicate when a search result is deemed worthy of the label “fact check”. This is done by checking the criteria set by third-parties like PoliFact, Snopes, etc.
What Google does is that they provide a link to these third-party sites and indicate whether that site deemed the information true or false. In addition to these third-party sites, Google also collaborates with all the top news companies in the world.
International Fact-Checking Network (WhatsApp Number: +17272912606)
WhatsApp is one of the leading social media platforms that is used daily. In Ghana alone, over 1 million people use WhatsApp daily. Also, WhatsApp is one of the most used means of sharing news in the world.
Because of that, there is a fake checker bot on WhatsApp. The name of this company is International Fact-Checking Network; an umbrella organization for fact-checkers around the world.
All you have to do is to save the WhatsApp number above and then follow the options that they provide. Since it is a chatbot, it will give you instructions on how to ask whether a certain news article is true or false.
Fact Check Ghana
Fact Check Ghana is Ghana’s own fact-checking tool that is used to check whether news or article is fake or genuine. This tool or site was developed by the Media Foundation for West Africa to combat the spread of fake news in Ghana.
On this site, you can see controversial news stories that have been regarded as fake news and those that have been fact-checked. The ones that has been fact-checked, you will find fact-checked under the story or article.
The categories on this website are Politics, Economy, Education, Health, and Monthly Round-ups. Also, you can listen to their podcast on SoundCloud (there is a link to the podcast on their website).
GhanaFact
GhanaFact is Ghana’s Independent Fact-checking platform for checking facts and detecting fake news.
On this website, you will find fake news and those that have been fact-checked. The fake news has the prefix “FAKE” and those that have been fact-checked have the prefix “FACT-CHECKED”.
If you have a claim you wish to submit for GhanaFact to check for you, you first of all click on the three horizontal lines on the homepage of GhanaFact and then click on “Submit a claim to check”. Or, send your claim to the WhatsApp number +233244499971 and they will fact-check the claim and get back to you as soon as possible.
Dubawa
The last fact-checking tool on our list is Dubawa. Dubawa is an international fact-checking tool created to help combat the spread of fake news in the world.
Just like all the fact-checking tools on our list today, you can also check for facts and fake news on Dubawa. They played a major role in the combatting of fake news in the 2020 General Elections in Ghana.
Head over to Dubawa and check your facts and let’s all help combat the spread of fake news in and out of Ghana.
