Fatima de Aosfatos

An article published by Alessandra Monnerat (2018) in the Knight Center at the Univer-sity of Texas in Austin, described how a conversational bot could help combat fake news during the Brazilian elections in which Jair Bolsonaro won. Brazilian voters had a robot assistant available to combat disinformation during that year’s general elections. Her name is Fátima, a conversational bot developed by the fact-checking site team Aos Fatos in collaboration with Facebook. The launch was scheduled for June 2018.

Through Messenger, the instantaneous messaging service from Facebook, the bot would provide information through conversation, with suggestions on how to analyze news published online. Fátima, whose name is a play on the words “FactMa,” an ab-breviation of Fact Machine, would recommend that readers check to see if a story was published by a known news site or if the language used in the text conformed to journal-istic standards. According to Aos Fatos’ statement, from the teachings of Fatima, news consumers learned how to distinguish news from opinions, to find reliable information on various topics, and to know whether a source is reliable or not.

TruthBuzz

Based on the ICFJ Knight Fellowships, the TruthBuzz program aims to help reporters use compelling story methods that improve the scope and impact of the verification of fact-finding and help “protect” audiences by arming them against false or misleading information. Through a collaboration with First Draft News, interns and their news-room partners will receive fact-checking and verification training.

The TruthBuzz Initiative aims to improve the scope and influence of facts by communi-cating and sharing proven information convincingly. It was initially launched as a global competition to find new ways to help verified facts reach the widest audience possible. The winning 2017 entries, which included political caricatures, videos, and an applica-tion modeled on a classic video game, identified novel methods to combat disinforma-tion and share solid, instantly understandable data checks.

Facterbot

Facterbot is a Facebook Messenger chatbot designed to send compelling fake news to users’ inboxes. In addition to informing users about the most recent information, it aims to help fact-checkers to do their job better.

Facterbot was designed by David Jiménez, a master’s student in journalism innovation at the Miguel Hernández University. For Jiménez, “fake stories are shared more than the findings of facts that disprove them.” While Fatima (from AosFatos) and Projeto Lupe! take advantage of the respective checks to answer questions in real-time. Facterbot de-livers a general summary of popular information on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fri-days. Users can choose between pre-selected answers to learn more about each story or ask questions about different topics. It even offers Spanish translations.