fact-checking outreach?

Say you check some facts and write it up, like Snopes or Full Fact or Chequeado or Africa Check etc. That's great if people go find your fact-check, of click on it from a Google "fact check" link or whatever. But lots of people are seeing/spreading misinformation and aren't going to go find the fact check.

Is there anything that proactively reaches out to people to provide fact checks? I'm imagining something like a twitter bot that looks for people retweeting a fake video (for example) and replies with a message that includes a link to a Snopes fact check.

Does something like it exist? Has it been tried and failed?

My first three (pessimistic) thoughts would be 1] false positives would be a big problem, 2] few people seem to be convinced by "facts" when posting conspiracy theories, 3] searching for a specific image/video in most social media is hard (as opposed to text).

I don't know any bots out there that do this, the only ones that seem to work in an automated fashion are simple rule based like @StealthMountain (look at the "likes" of the account to see how many people appropriate being corrected for a grammar error).

One thing that you could do, is start building media hashes of content, that way you could track identical images/videos that are being shared. Coupled that with a similairty metric, you could find images that are closer after compression.

I think he got around[weird twitter rules] by saying he tweets everything himself. Which might be possible with a low enough volume.

ajschumacher / ajschumacher.github.io

fact-checking outreach? #161