About

Metafact is a crowd-sourced fact-checking platform that helps people find the truth. ##

We do this by matching thousands of verified experts to review factual claims asked by users. This helps people separate fact from opinion around important questions in their lives.

Why Does Metafact Exist? https://www.knightfoundation.org/reports/indicators-of-news-media-trust">The majority of Americans don't believe the news media, while [a recent MIT study] (http://news.mit.edu/2018/study-twitter-false-news-travels-faster-true-stories-0308) found that lies spread 6-times faster than the truth on social media. Technology is accelerating the impact of misinformation but there are still no independent, trusted tools for people to verify facts online - Metafact aims to solve this problem.

Limitations of existing approaches Despite the large investment in Artificial intelligence there has been little progress to solving misinformation. Facebook and Google still rely on outsourced human fact-checkers to detect news misinformation online (eg Snopes, PolitiFact, FullFact etc) - but these traditional approaches suffer from lack of scalability, reach beyond politics, quality and [independence] (https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2018/google-suspends-fact-checking-feature-over-quality-concerns/).

Scalable, independent, science-driven approach to fact-checking Metafact is introducing a unique approach to fact-checking that is a mixture between Quora, Snopes and scientific peer-review. We allow users to question claims - then match those with hundreds of verified experts to review claims openly and independently. This allows Metafact to build a scalable rating score amongst experts, giving people a more trusted place for knowledge on the internet. [Here’s a good example] (https://metafact.io/factchecks/266-is-there-evidence-that-light-drinking-by-pregnant-women-harms-their-babies) relating to a question on alcohol and pregnant women where 25 experts answered.

Quick Facts So Far
Metafact began in January 2018 and is based in Sydney and San Francisco and has over 11,500 registered scientists and experts so far to review factual claims or questions. Over 500 questions/claims have been reviewed by experts from over 350 scientific fields and over 550 institutions from Harvard to NASA. We have initially focused our approach on health, medicine and science questions.

Kickstarter Campaign Metafact is an open knowledge platform, with no paywalls and no ads. We have launched a [Kickstarter campaign] (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/metafact/metafact-fact-checking-powered-by-science?ref=2eyfmb) and raised 25% of our goal in the first 24 hours.

https://metafact.io/ (official website)