Our Fact-Checking Process
TFC covers a wide range of public interest themes, including health care, environmental ecology, educational debates, gender issues, business activities, and government policies.
We fact-check and verify false information, either coming from media coverage or online rumors. TFC covers a wide range of public interest themes, including health care, environmental ecology, educational debates, gender issues, business activities, and government policies.
On political issues, the subjects of fact-checking are selected across different ideological positions. TFC strives to give each position equal attention even though the TFC does not attempt to set an absolute balance in terms of numbers of items fact-checked among the varied positions. To avoid a significant imbalance, besides reviewing subjects during the initial selection process, we continuously monitor the statistics of the fact-checks involving political affairs among various positions in the weekly meetings.
Besides, each fact-check explains its process. A complete list of source material, information, and data used for verification is attached at the end of the report. Hyperlinks are embedded when the source and documents referenced in the report can be accessed online as well as key sections are presented in screenshots. Regarding information acquired by interviewing experts and scholars, the names and titles of the interviewers are clearly listed in the report, too.
We have the fact-checking guidelines explaining how we select claims:
- Is the claim related to the welfare or well-being of the general public? Does the claim sound misleading or wrong?
- Is the claim checkable? TFC can not check opinions or predictions.
- Is the claim meaningful or significant enough to society?
- Does this claim have a great impact on our society?
- How viral does the claim spread?
- Does TFC have the related ability to fact-check the claim?
- Was the claim fact-checked by TFC before? If yes, TFC may relocate the resources to other new topics to ensure we cover a broader field.
TFC uses a fact-checking chatbot to collect claims and cross-check and monitor the reach of claims using various social research tools to determine the priority to check.