Building alliances for fact-checking

Chequeado is an Argentinian fact-checking non-governmental, non-profit, non-partisan organization whose mission is to “contribute to improving the quality of public debate to strengthen the democratic system”. 

The organization has found collaboration to be an essential element of their fact-checking work, Working in collaboration with other journalists and researchers has allowed for expanded reach and more robust fact-checking efforts. 

 In 2019, 2021, and 2023 they led a large collaborative initiative called Reverso, designed to address misinformation during election periods. This project led to the organization expanding their work into other areas. 

Olivia Sohr, Director of Impact and New Initiatives at Chequeado, says:  “We started to make these alliances with more than 100 media outlets throughout the country to disprove disinformation, and at the same time we developed new areas that went beyond journalism, and then we developed the area of education to focus on adolescents, on media literacy. 

“I think our role went from creating a non-traditional publication, because we were always digital, but thought of as something more traditional, to a space that tries to intervene in different parts of that ecosystem and in different ways.”

They have found research alliances to be a strong strategy in fighting disinformation through knowledge sharing, mapping information flows and conducting research.  

“I think it is very important and necessary to have research on the more general trends, on how disinformation circulates in the different platforms, between platforms and between countries and so on, and that we do much of that as a supplementary layer to the fact check itself or to the specific check. Many times we use the specific fact check as an input to then have a more general picture.”