Fact-checking initiatives gaining ground in Philippines

MANILA, Philippines — With the spread of disinformation still seen as a major challenge in the Philippines ahead of the May elections, more groups are taking part in efforts to fact-check claims made online, a journalism professor at the University of the Philippine said.

Rachel Khan, associate dean of the UP College of Mass Communication and coordinator of fact-checking collaborative group Tsek.ph, noted that even academic institutions and civil society organizations are now conducting fact-checking initiatives to combat disinformation.

“When we were starting Tsek.ph in 2019, we still had to convince newsrooms that fact-checking was something that should be ordinary in any run of the newsroom… (that schools) should have something like this,” Khan said in an interview with “The Chiefs” over Cignal TV’s One News channel on Thursday night.

“When we were forming Tsek.ph in 2022, inviting more members, most universities had already immediately agreed once they were invited. They already knew what fact-checking was and they already saw its importance, so it was not very hard to build a team this time,” she added.

Now composed of 34 academic institutions, media and civil society organizations, Tsek.ph is a collaborative effort that seeks to combat political disinformation ahead of the May national and local elections. It collates fact-checks that were independently conducted by member-organizations in a website where the public can easily verify false claims that they encounter.

Noting there is more disinformation compared to 2019, Khan cited challenges such as rehashed false claims that have already been debunked in the past.

“Even our fact checks become repetitive sometimes because there’s a new angle to the same old fake information. So, what we’re seeing is a lot more activity, and one good thing is that there is also a lot more of us to tackle the growing number of disinformation,” Khan said.

She cited how social influencers are being used to spread disinformation, as well as Facebook groups that were converted to support particular candidates.

“At the same time, we are discovering a few fake fact-checkers and I think that people have to be aware that there are some Facebook pages and groups that claim to be fact checkers but are not,” she noted.

Despite the challenges, Khan said fact-checking initiatives would continue to make people more aware of the need to combat disinformation.

“We know that it’s a David and Goliath fight… What we hope is to help put people in a fact-checking state of mind and to build media literacy. That is the long game here, until we get people to be aware of the existence of false information and how they are fooled,” she pointed out.