The Fast and Furious Factcheck Challenge

The challenge: Let's create a nearly-instant system for factchecking the claims across a variety of media platforms.

Full Fact has partnered with HeroX, the platform for global competition, to design a competition for automated factchecking.

The Fast and Furious Fact Check Challenge  was dreamt up by Diane Francis, an American-Canadian journalist and entrepreneur, who wanted to find a solution to the bombardment of misinformation in the digital age: “A tech solution to a problem caused by tech.”

Diane approached HeroX, who have previously run competitions such as the Forbes Under 30 $1 Million Change the World and the Rockerfeller Foundation Storytelling Challenge, to design this global competition, with a prize of $50,000.

But automated factchecking isn’t easy — we’ve spent months working on it. It was through our report on automated factchecking that Diane and HeroX came across us, and asked us to help design the competition. We’ll be helping to make it the best competition it can be.

How? We’ll be releasing claims for the contestants to factcheck, spanning different types and complexities. As factcheckers who do this day in and day out, we’re well placed to identify the ways in which claims are made, repeated, and checked. We’ll also be helping validate the winning entries and making our recommendation to the judges for the team that has done best.

Are you a developer or a journalist with an idea for making factchecking faster and more furious? Do you fancy winning $50,000? There’s still time to apply: the submission deadline is 7th November 2016. Enter the Fast and Furious Fact Check Challenge.

We’ll be doing a live webinar with Diane Francis on October 13th at 4pm. You can sign up here.