Discipline and promote: Building infrastructure and managing algorithms in a “structured journalism” project by professional fact-checking groups

Abstract

News organizations have adapted in various ways to a digital media environment dominated by algorithmic gatekeepers such as search engines and social networks. This article dissects a campaign to actively shape that environment led by professional fact-checking organizations. We trace the development of the Share the Facts “widget,” a device designed to give fact-checks greater purchase in algorithmically governed media networks by driving adoption of a new data standard called ClaimReview. We show how “structured journalism” gave journalists a language for the social and technical challenges involved, and how this infrastructural technology mediates between fact-checkers, audiences, and platform companies. We argue that this standard-setting initiative exhibits both promotional and disciplining facets, offering greater distribution and impact to journalists while also defining their work in specific ways. Crucially, in this case, this disciplining influence reflects internal professional-institutional agendas in an emerging subfield of journalism as much as the demands of platform companies.

Disinformation as a Threat to Deliberative Democracy

“…Social media platforms disrupted the preexisting institutions and practices that amplified or filtered out claims in media systems. In particular, they have partially displaced journalists as gatekeepers (Graves and Anderson 2020). This development is not entirely negative, because journalistic news selection often excludes diverse perspectives and caters to holders of political or economic power, among other defects.…”

The Epistemologies of Breaking News

“…Scholars have also analyzed the epistemological implications of changes in the circulation of news (Carlson 2020) and what has been described as the dislocation of news in the digital mediascape (Ekström and Westlund 2019b). Moreover, research has qualified our understanding of the diverse epistemologies in analyses of live blogging (Matheson and Wahl-Jorgensen 2020), participatory journalism (Kligler-Vilenchik and Tenenboim 2020), data journalism (Lewis and Westlund 2015;Zamith 2019), structured journalism (Graves and Anderson 2020), news aggregation (Coddington 2018) and emerging forms of automated journalism (Carlson 2018;Lewis, Guzman, and Schmidt 2019).…”

Redes sociales y plataformas de fact-checking contra la desinformación sobre la COVID-19

“…Estas sinergias deben permitir optimizar recursos, potenciar la realización conjunta de verificaciones más complejas y asegurar una mayor visibilidad de los trabajos realizados. También resultará primordial una mayor colaboración entre las plataformas de fact-checking y actores como Google, Facebook y Twitter (Graves y Anderson, 2020). En el momento presente, dichas empresas están trabajando en la monitorización y eliminación de materiales falsos relacionados con la pandemia (Brennen et al, 2020) Los resultados de este trabajo deben comprenderse en el marco de las limitaciones del estudio: se han analizado 8 cuentas de Twitter operadas por organizaciones independientes de fact-checking de 7 países diferentes (Brasil, Argentina, España, Colombia, Ecuador, México y Venezuela) entre los meses de marzo y junio de 2020.…”