Full Fact

Full Fact
Fact-checking the UK's EU referendum[1]
Founded 2009
Founder Will Moy
Type charity
Registration no. 1158683[2]
Location
Coordinates 51°30′19″N 0°08′11″W / 51.505194°N 0.136471°W / 51.505194; -0.136471Coordinates: 51°30′19″N 0°08′11″W / 51.505194°N 0.136471°W / 51.505194; -0.136471
Revenue (2015)
£557,154[2]
Employees
11
Volunteers
2
Website fullfact.org

Full Fact is a charity based in London to check and correct facts reported in the news.

Foundation

It was founded in 2009 by Will Moy (director) who now leads a staff of eleven.[3] Moy founded the organisation after working as a researcher for Lord Low and noticing that lobbyists often provided inaccurate briefings to such legislators.[4]

Full Fact applied to the Charity Commission for charitable status when it was being founded in 2009 but this was refused. An appeal was heard by the commission's tribunal in 2011 but this was rejected on the grounds that the stated objective of "civic engagement" was too political in nature. The wording was changed to "the advancement of public education" and charitable status was then granted in 2014.[5][6]

Methodology

Full Fact initially rated material on a five-point scale, using a magnifying glass as a symbol, instead of a star. They dropped this system as they felt such ratings were unreliable and so did not enhance their long-term reputation.[7]

The fact-checking process includes a three-stage review.[8] Facts may then be reviewed by external academics too.[8]

Full Fact has been sponsored to develop automated fact-checking tools by the Omidyar Network and Open Society Foundations. Live is one of the tools that is intended to immediately check statements against a database of verified facts. The other tool is called Trends and this will track and display the spread of false information.[9]

Full Fact offers three-month secondments to statisticians working in the Government Statistical Service. Secondees have performed activities such as fact-checking Question Time and providing guidance on the presentation of statistics. Full Fact has also partnered with media organisations including the BBC, ITV and Sky News to provide information about political campaigns including the Scottish and UK referenda and the general elections of 2015 and 2017. It also provided evidence to the Leveson Inquiry and the BBC Trust's impartiality review.[10]

Elections and referendums

In 2016, Full Fact covered the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum to check claims made during the campaign.[11] For example, the most controversial claim was that the UK spent £350M a week on the EU.[12] Full Fact found that this was false, as the net amount paid after the UK's rebate and expenditure on UK based projects was about £160M per week.[13]

In 2017, Full Fact collaborated with another similar organisation, First Draft, to staff a fact-checking team covering the UK general election.[14]

References

  1. ↑ Sinéad Boultwood (17 May 2016), Full Fact's first Wikipedia edit-a-thon, Full Fact
  2. 1 2 1158683 – FULL FACT, Charity Commission
  3. ↑ About Full Fact: How did you get started?, 2017
  4. ↑ Suzannah Brecknell (5 May 2016), "Full Fact's Will Moy on lobbyist "nonsense", official corrections and why we know more about golf than crime stats", Civil Service World
  5. ↑ Sam Burne James (29 September 2014), Full Fact gains charitable status five years after first application, Third Sector
  6. ↑ Andrew Gilligan (6 Apr 2013), "How Leveson was denied the full facts", Sunday Telegraph
  7. ↑ Lucas Graves (2016), Deciding What's True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism, Columbia University Press, p. 41, ISBN 9780231542227
  8. 1 2 Alexios Mantzarlis (23 June 2016), Lessons from fact-checking the Brexit debate, The Poynter Institute
  9. ↑ Mădălina Ciobanu (3 July 2017), "Full Fact is developing two new tools for automated fact-checking", Journalism, Mousetrap Media
  10. ↑ About Full Fact (PDF), Government Statistical Service, 2017
  11. ↑ Roy Greenslade (9 March 2016), "Websites sort the facts from the fiction for EU referendum voters", The Guardian
  12. ↑ Armstrong, Kenneth (2017), Brexit Time, Cambridge University Press, p. 67, ISBN 9781108415378
  13. ↑ "The UK's EU membership fee". Full Fact. 2016-07-13. Retrieved 2018-07-10.
  14. ↑ Robert Booth (20 May 2017), "Truth seekers: inside the UK election's fake news war room", The Guardian, p. 1
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