Brazilian News Organizations Launch Fact-Checking Site
Brazilians will go to the polls on October 7 to vote in the first round of the 2018 presidential elections. Twenty-four media organizations in Brazil have partnered with the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University to counter misinformation spread in the lead-up to the election. This effort, Project Comprova, will attempt to verify viral claims spread through WhatsApp and Facebook.
Comprova, which means “proof” in Portuguese, is coordinated by Abraji, the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism, and funded by the Google News Initiative and the Facebook Journalism Project. It is based on similar fact-checking services that the Kennedy School has helped start such as Verificado in Mexico and Cross-Check in France. Abraji operates a tip line for potentially fake viral news and assigns the rumor to several news editors at the member media organizations. In order for the verification to be published, at least three of the news organizations must reach the same conclusion on the viral story. Comprova does not address official statements or policies from campaigns, unless there is a suspicion that the statements are not actually from the campaign.
The actual Comprova website is not expected to receive much traffic from Brazilians visiting the site regularly. Rather, the member organizations of Comprova are expected to publish the findings to the general public. These include mainstream organizations like Folha de São Paulo, UOL, and Poder360. Comprova hopes that this will get the word out to individuals who would not necessarily seek out the fact-checking service to verify certain images they see online.
The focus for Comprova is on WhatsApp, which has over 120 million users in Brazil. Viral stories are frequently shared and disseminated throughout WhatsApp networks. After presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed during a campaign rally in September, an audio recording of an alleged rant by Bolsonaro from his hospital bed bolstered the theory that the stabbing was fake. Over 400 people reported the recording to Comprova, which confirmed that the audio recording was fake.
After launching on August 6, Comprova has already refuted other prominent viral stories. It has investigated claims that Venezuela has rigged ballot boxes, candidates’ connections to Hungarian-American financier and philanthropist George Soros, and left-wing violence against senior citizen voters; it found all to be untrue. Additionally, Comprova confirmed that an image circulating on WhatsApp of presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s name written into soy fields was genuine.
Comprova acknowledges its limitations as a fact-checking service. It cannot be certain that its verifications will reach the audience that it needs to or if the verifications themselves will even be accepted by the public. Comprova is confident that its verification process will avoid the spread of viral misinformation in the lead-up to the presidential election.