Fake news are a big problem these days, so there's almost no getting around it.

Because so many people have a hard time to deciper real from fake information, I decided to make a small list of fact-checking websites to fight against misinformation. 

I will say in advance that I have deliberately left out Websites that focus mainly on American politics. Firstly, because I am not American and therefore don’t feel qualified enought, and secondly, because this list is meant to be general and not focused on a specific topic.  

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Fact Check Institutions

Snopes,  formerly known as the Urban Legends Reference Pages, is a fact-checking website.

The Website aims to debunk or confirm widely spread urban legends. The site has been referenced by news media and other sites, including CNN, MSNBC, Fortune, Forbes, and The New York Times. (source: Wikipedia)

The Reporters’ Lab maintains a database of global fact-checking sites.

The Reporters’ Lab is a center for journalism research in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Their core projects focus on fact-checking, but they also do occasional research about trust in the news media and other topics. (source: Duke Reporters’ Lab)

Full Fact is a British charity, based in London, which checks and corrects facts reported in the news as well as claims which circulate on social media.

(source: Wikipedia) 

Fact check search engine

The Fact Check Tools consist of two tools: Fact Check Explorer and Fact Check Markup Tool. Both tools aim to facilitate the work of fact checkers, journalists and researchers. (source: Google Fact Check Tools) 

Check photos/videos

* Image reverse search with Yandex or Google

Yandex is a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. (source: Wikipedia) 

From my own experience, I can say that image searches on Yandex are usually more successful than on Google image. 

Google Images (previously Google Image Search) is a search service owned by Google that allows users to search the World Wide Web for image content. (source: Wikipedia)

TinEye’s computer vision, image recognition and reverse image search products power applications that make your images searchable. (source: Tineye)

Online EXIF & Metadata Viewer is a tool that allows to show you hidden metadata that is embedded in a file. (source: Exifmeta) 

This is only one example of a metadata viewer, there are many more.

But you are probably asking yourself: what does this have to do with fake news? Well, you can tell approximately when and where a photo was taken. Why would you need to know that?

Well, sometimes fake news take a photo completely out of context and link it to something that has nothing at all to do with the photo. 

The YouTube DataViewer is a web-based video verification tool offered through The Citizen Evidence Lab, created by Amnesty International. (source: Wikipedia) 

Simply insert the link to the desired video in the and all the metadata that is publicly available will appear. Among other things, the YouTube ID, the upload date including time, and the video thumbnails are useful for checking videos for authenticity.

Varia

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web, founded by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit library based in San Francisco. It allows the user to go “back in time” and see what websites looked like in the past. 

(source: Wikipedia) 

Worldometers is run by an international team of developers, researchers, and volunteers with the goal of making world statistics available in a thought-provoking and time relevant format to a wide audience around the world.

(source: worldometer)

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Honorable mentions: 

There’s also the “List of fact-checking websites”, but theres a notice on the site that some of the article's listed sources may not be reliable 

(status: December 2020 / source: Wikipedia)

Auditionally, there is also the Image Error Level Analyser, which can help to identify manipulations to compressed (JPEG) images by detecting the distribution of error introduced after resaving the image at a specific compression rate. The analyser is but a project, so the creator advises to not  not take the results of this tool to seriously. 

(source: Image Error Level Analyser) 

Also, for other specified Websites: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fact-checking_websites

My teacher would chop my head of if she saw how much I quoted Wikipedia.  

Pray for me that she’ll never find this post. (❁´◡`❁)/