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Charlie Beckett

February 26th, 2017

Filtering out French fake news: LSE students join verification project

1 comment

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Charlie Beckett

February 26th, 2017

Filtering out French fake news: LSE students join verification project

1 comment

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

I am one of four French postgraduate students in the LSE Media and Communications involved in CrossCheck, an exciting journalistic collaborative verification project that helps French voters for the Presidential Election to make sense of what and who to trust online.

This article by LSE MSc student Margaux Gatty.

LSE’s French fake news fighters: Sophie Chauvet, Margaux Gatty, Alix De Ladoucette, Margot Cadic

This project, partnered with First Draft in the lead up to French elections, is supported by Google News Lab, Facebook, newsrooms (AFP, Buzzfeed, Le Monde, BBC, Channel 4 and many others) and technology partners such as CrowdTangle, NewsWhip etc. For us students, it is a chance to become new pioneers in collaborative journalism.

In February we were taken to a beautiful castle in Normandy (where ironically enough for journalists, there were no phone signal), where we were served so much food it became a challenge to stay focused for a crash course on how to verify news content in 100s of ways. The training was rich and taught us expertise across numerous media and technology platforms.

We have now become project editors for the next 2 months verifying and cross-checking the trending news that surfaces in our assigned newsrooms in order to ensure content circulated online in relation to the French presidential elections is accurately reported to the public. It is especially important to reach out to the 43 million registered voters that will cast their ballots.

We’ll be reporting back during the campaign on our  bid to filter out fake French news.

This article by LSE MSc student Margaux Gatty. @gattymargaux

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Charlie Beckett

Posted In: Featured | International | Politics | Student blogs

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