{"id":640452,"date":"2013-01-29T12:08:26","date_gmt":"2013-01-29T17:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paidcontent.org\/?p=223850"},"modified":"2013-01-29T12:08:26","modified_gmt":"2013-01-29T17:08:26","slug":"can-you-automate-political-fact-checking-in-real-time-truth-teller-is-going-to-try","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/640452","title":{"rendered":"Can you automate political fact-checking in real time? Truth Teller is going to try"},"content":{"rendered":"

Funded in part by the Knight Foundation for Journalism, the Washington Post<\/em> has just launched a new project called “Truth Teller,”<\/a> which is designed to fact-check political speeches and comments in real time. It’s an ambitious effort that is based on an idea the Post<\/em>‘s political editor had in 2011, and makes use of speech-to-text technology and a number of other tools. But the project<\/a> raises a number of thorny questions, including: Is it even possible to fact-check the most egregious types of political disinformation? And if Truth Teller does manage to do this, will anyone care?<\/p>\n

The funding for the venture comes from the Knight Prototype Fund<\/a>, a relatively new effort from the foundation that is designed to help jump-start new ideas and startups — it invests via grants of up to $50,000 and says that the program is intended to help entrepreneurs “build fast [and] fail fast” while they try to reinvent the way that journalism works online.<\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/em>‘s political editor, Steven Ginsberg, got the idea for a real-time fact-checking service while he was watching a speech<\/a> given by former Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann in 2011. During her talk at a sports bar in Iowa, the candidate repeatedly misled her audience and Ginsberg said he envisioned a mobile app that would have allowed anyone to check whether she was telling the truth as she was speaking, and then challenge her statements.<\/p>\n

Truth Teller checks facts against a Post database<\/h2>\n

The beta prototype that the Post<\/em> launched on Tuesday isn’t quite there yet — it is only capable of checking facts related to taxation law<\/a> and proposed changes to those laws, information that has been hand-fed to the system. But eventually, the newspaper says that the application should be able to do this about a wide range of topics by checking the Post<\/em>‘s database in real time.<\/p>\n

\"Truth<\/a><\/p>\n

The Post<\/em>‘s executive producer for digital news, Cory Haik, explains that the application turns speech from a video into text and then checks statements from that text version<\/a> with an algorithm (a modified Rabin-Karp using Levenshtein distance). While watching a video of House Speaker John Boehner, for example, when he says that raising the top tax rate would “kill 700,000 jobs,” the application pops up a large warning in red, saying: “False.”<\/p>\n

Below the video, there is a transcript of the speech, and users can click on any sentence and go to that section of the video — and they can also “view source” and see the basis for the newspaper’s claim that something is false. In the case of the Speaker of the House’s claim, it’s a piece from Glenn Kesler, who writes a column called The Fact Checker, and wrote a post specifically addressing<\/a> Boehner’s statement — and ultimately awarded it three Pinocchios, which are the newspaper’s version of a thumbs down on the facts.<\/p>\n