Vérifier l’info : le fact-checking - Samuel Etienne / Aude WTFake - La Collab' de l'info

Information that travels fast, too fast. A shocking photo, so biased that it's suspect. With social media, sensationalism often takes precedence over information. How can you be sure that what you see is true, that what's circulating is accurate? How can you avoid sharing everything and anything on your news feed? Samuel Etienne and Aude WTFake give you the basics of fact-checking. Aude WTFake:    / @audewtfake   -- Join us on:   / francetveducation     / francetveducation     / francetveduc   -- ↓↓ More sources ↓↓ Laurent Bigot, “Fact-checking has a long history,” May 2017 Pierre Memheld, Verifying information in the era of post-truth and big data Fact/Fake, the truth or the falsehood? (CLEMI Nice) Fact-checking: serving democracy? ​​Verifying information, CLEMI. - Les décodeurs, Le Monde Checknews.fr Les observateurs, France 24 L’instant détox, France Info -- Nowadays, fact-checking focuses on verifying everything said in the media, especially since the internet has changed a lot. There's already more information available. Newspapers, radio, social media, TV... The pace of news is much faster than before. 24-hour news channels, tweets, push notifications... Push notifications are the thing that means that when you're watching a Beyoncé concert on your phone, all of a sudden you see "Hey! Jean-Jacques Bourdin vs. Christian Estrosi" in 5 minutes. It's truly a step forward for humanity. And today, news is produced by many more people than before. Oh yeah! It's not just journalists who have a microphone anymore. Facebook and Twitter are millions of microphones given to millions of people. And that's really cool in itself, by the way. People express themselves, share their points of view, and they can also provide information—it's not just us. And without the internet, I would never have known the cosmic Christ... The what? Never mind. But to sort out the truth from the lies in all the hubbub the internet has created, you need professional investigators. Since the 2000s, fact-checking has evolved in two main directions. First, it debunks rumors, fake news, and hoaxes, especially on the internet. That's what sites like Désintox, les Observateurs, Décodeurs, and you, Aude, do. - Yes, but there's also True or Fake, Hoaxbuster, or Hoaxkiller… AFP's fact-checking service, Agence France-Presse. It has correspondents all over the world. One of their latest discoveries is this: a widely shared image. So to put things into context, it's early August 2018, and California, in the United States, is experiencing massive forest fires. Gigantic flames, tornadoes of fire, making this incident the largest disaster in the state's history. Except our image doesn't show the California sky at all. No, this photo was taken more than 3,500 km away, above the Hawaiian archipelago, on July 22, a few days before the fires started, during a sunset. - By performing a reverse photo search, the manipulation appears live, and we quickly realize that it's a fairly common meteorological phenomenon and ultimately much less dramatic... Well, maybe the person who spread this false information simply made a mistake, or was mistaken. But a lot of fake news is knowingly spread by real manipulators, particularly on migrants or societal issues, for example. Hence the importance of fact-checking in an attempt to clarify the public debate. And those who drive this debate are politicians. This brings us to the second priority of fact-checking: verifying politicians' statements to uncover errors or inaccuracies. - For example, Nicolas Sarkozy claimed to have been in Berlin on the day of the famous fall of the wall, in 1989. On his Facebook page he wrote: “On the morning of November 9, [...] we decided to leave Paris with Alain Juppé to participate in the upcoming event. Arriving in West Berlin, we headed towards the Brandenburg Gate where an enthusiastic crowd had already gathered at the announcement of the probable opening of the wall.” And he proves it with a photo of himself, attacking the wall from the East side. Except that...