Factcheck Org And The Fight Against Misinformation Penn Today

(From left) Doctoral student Hannah Yamagata, research assistant professor Kushol Gupta, and postdoctoral fellow Marshall Padilla holding 3D-printed models of nanoparticles. Jin Liu, Penn’s newest economics faculty member, specializes in international trade. Este artículo estará disponible en español en El Tiempo Latino. Misinformation is nothing new. It has, however, become ubiquitous and, in some cases, more difficult and time-consuming than ever to debunk. When we first started publishing in 2003 — which predated Facebook (2004), YouTube (2005) and Twitter (2006) — viral misinformation took the form of chain emails.

Although they were a problem at the time, chain emails were to misinformation what the Pony Express is to ChatGPT. As the popularity of social media platforms has grown, so too has the scope of viral misinformation and the speed with which it travels. And this falsehood-fraught environment is increasingly where people get their news. In a survey of U.S. adults last year, the Pew Research Center found that “just over half of U.S. adults (54%) say they at least sometimes get news from social media.”

© 2025 WWB Holdings, LLC. All rights reserved Facebook will no longer have independent fact-checking organizations review suspicious posts and provide articles that correct misinformation on the platform, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Tuesday. FactCheck.org, based in Philadelphia, is one of the nonprofits that had been part of the company's program. Facebook parent company Meta revealed sweeping changes on Tuesday that will alter the way the social media giant moderates content and combats the spread of misinformation on its platforms. The policy shift marks an end to Meta's partnerships with independent fact-checking organizations, which started just before President-elect Donald Trump took office for his first term in 2017.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg called the decision a response to the outcome of November's elections, which he described as a "cultural tipping point" toward prioritizing freedom of speech. MORE: Medical debt to be removed from credit reports of 15 million Americans Q: Will U.S. citizens receive stimulus or tariff-based checks of $2,000 in November? A: No checks are being issued. President Donald Trump said he wants to use tariff revenue to give “dividend” payments of “at least $2,000” to “middle-income people and lower-income people.” But no formal plan has been finalized and approved by...

Fiscal policy experts say there’s not enough tariff revenue for that. Walmart’s 2025 Thanksgiving meal consisting of pre-selected products costs about one-quarter less than last year’s meal, but it also includes fewer grocery items and different food brands. Yet President Donald Trump has been misleadingly touting the decline in the price of this year’s meal without mentioning the reasons for the big decrease. In defending his Oct. 23 pardon of Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, President Donald Trump claimed that Zhao was the victim of a Biden administration “witch hunt.” We’ll look at the basis of the Zhao case, Trump’s claims about... Over the course of the six-week shutdown — which may be ending soon — President Donald Trump has repeatedly made the false claim that Democrats “want $1.5 trillion for health care for illegal aliens.”

Just because you read it on Facebook or somebody’s blog or in an email from a friend or relative doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s probably not, as we advised in our special report “That Chain E-mail Your Friend Sent to You Is (Likely) Bogus. Seriously,” on March 18, 2008. We also addressed the problem of bogus “stories” from fake news sites in “How to Spot Fake News,” on Nov. 18, 2016. More recently, we wrote about ways to debunk misinformation in “How to Combat Misinformation,” on April 2, 2025.

On this page, we feature a list of the false or misleading viral rumors we’re asked about most often, and a brief summary of the facts. But click on the links to read the full articles. There is a lot more detail in each answer. If you’re looking for articles about other viral claims, please use our search function. Will U.S. citizens receive stimulus or tariff-based checks of $2,000 in November?No checks are being issued.

President Donald Trump said he wants to use tariff revenue to give “dividend” payments of “at least $2,000” to “middle-income people and lower-income people.” But no formal plan has been finalized and approved by... Fiscal policy experts say there’s not enough tariff revenue for that.Nov. 14, 2025 Posts Spread False Claim About DOGE Halting Supposed Obamacare ‘Royalties‘Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have been tasked by President Donald Trump with slashing federal spending. But social media posts falsely claim that as part of that effort, DOGE stopped “royalties” to former President Barack Obama related to the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare. The claim came from a satirical website.Feb.

28, 2025 Does the U.S. provide medical insurance and voting rights to immigrants in the country illegally? No. A viral meme misrepresents what such immigrants are entitled to in the U.S.Nov. 9, 2018

These sources have minimal bias and use very few loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using an appeal to emotion or stereotypes). The reporting is factual and usually sourced. These are the most credible media sources. See all Least Biased sources. Bias Rating: LEAST BIASED (-0.1) Factual Reporting: VERY HIGH (0.0) Country: USA MBFC’s Country Freedom Rank: MOSTLY FREE Media Type: Organization/Foundation Traffic/Popularity: High Traffic MBFC Credibility Rating: HIGH CREDIBILITY FactCheck.org is a nonprofit website that describes itself as a non-partisan “We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S.

politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.” FactCheck.org has won multiple Webby Awards in the Politics category. Read our country’s media profile on the USA.

Across two decades, the Annenberg Public Policy Center project expanded by adding scientific fact checking, translating content into Spanish, and addressing viral social media misinformation. When the Annenberg Public Policy Center launched FactCheck.org, the site had one writer—veteran journalist Brooks Jackson—debunking political deceptions for an audience of journalists. Now, the nonprofit has nine full-time staffers, undergraduate fellows, and three freelance translators who convert content into Spanish, and the focus has expanded to include false or misleading scientific claims and viral misinformation on... The Brooks Jackson Prize for Fact-Checking was awarded to Salt Lake City station KSL-TV at this year's Walter Cronkite Awards in partnership with APPC. We've compiled a list of essential FactCheck.org reads about Secretary of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

and his remarks about vaccines, autism, Covid-19 and other topics. FactCheck.org rounded up its list of the biggest falsehoods of 2024, including claims from Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris. In his show "Last Week Tonight," comedian John Oliver cited FactCheck.org to debunk Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s misleading claims about autism. FactCheck.org Deputy Managing Editor Robert Farley has been awarded the Sigma Delta Chi Award for fact-checking claims made during the Biden impeachment investigation and inquiry.

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