Digital Experience, Social Impact

Checkbot, Checkbot on the wall, who’s the most trustworthy of them all?

More than half of people living in Slovakia believe in conspiracy theories. False information from questionable online sources is easily spread through Facebook, which does woefully very little to stop it in its tracks. Since social media can’t seem to take care of fake news on its own, we decided to step in and help.

Client: the public

What we used: Digital Campaign , Insights & Ideation , Intelligence & Monitoring ,

We created the first Facebook chatbot to help detect fake news on the web. To verify an article you’d like to share, you just sent it a link to the article in Facebook chat. Checkbot will recognise the words most commonly used by fake news media and disinformation sites. It is also capable of performing a reverse image search of images used in the article and will report on how many manipulations it found.

10,000 links sent in the first month

People who have a Facebook chat open with Checkbot can be warned when a hoax is being spread on the Internet and the bot can be managed by a live admin team as needed. Checkbot has already engaged in hundreds of conversations regarding disinformation articles in order to alert readers of manipulated facts and images, and the best part of it all is that it teaches people how to recognise fake news all by themselves.

Checkbot was praised by the media and the general public

Checkbot also passed the test of journalists, received lots of news coverage, and was noticed by both influencers and individual disinformation sites.