First Draft News is a project "to fight mis- and disinformation online" founded in 2015 by nine organizations brought together by the Google News Lab. It includes

Facebook Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

, the

Open Society Foundations Open Society Foundations (OSF), formerly the Open Society Institute, is a Grant (money), grantmaking network founded and chaired by business magnate George Soros. Open Society Foundations financially supports civil society groups around the wo ...

and several

philanthropic Philanthropy is a form of altruism that consists of "private initiatives, for the public good, focusing on quality of life". Philanthropy contrasts with business initiatives, which are private initiatives for private good, focusing on material ...

organizations.

Project description

The project draws on experts and organisations working in the field, including reported.ly, Eyewitness Media Hub,

Storyful Storyful is a social media intelligence agency headquartered in Dublin, Ireland that is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp offering services such as social news monitoring, video licensing, and reputation risk management tools for corpo ...

and Meedan. Google News Lab developed and maintains firstdraftnews.org and supports the creation of new content. In September 2016, First Draft began coordinating "efforts between newsrooms, fact-checking organizations, and academic institutions to combat mis- and disinformation". Coalition members publish how-to guides addressing topcis such as

ethics Ethics or moral philosophy is a branch of philosophy that "involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong behavior".''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' The field of ethics, along with aesthetics, concerns m ...

surrounding "use of eyewitness media" and how to "spot fake footage and

hoax A hoax is a widely publicized falsehood so fashioned as to invite reflexive, unthinking acceptance by the greatest number of people of the most varied social identities and of the highest possible social pretensions to gull its victims into pu ...

es". Newsrooms participating in the First Draft's CrossCheck project "cross-checked" each other, debunked stories, and developed methods to hinder "the spread of misleading and fabricated content" for the 2017 French, UK, and German elections. Claire Wardle, First Draft’s executive director, has stated: “With elections being a prime target for agents who create and spread disinformation, partnering with a research center that focuses on the intersection of media, politics and technology is a natural fit”. In October 2017, First Draft moved to the

Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy The Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy is a Harvard Kennedy School research center that explores the intersection and impact of media, politics and public policy in theory and practice. Among other activities, the center or ...

, part of the

John F. Kennedy School of Government The Harvard Kennedy School (HKS), officially the John F. Kennedy School of Government, is the school of public policy and government of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school offers master's degrees in public policy, public ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

. In February 2019, it was reported that First Draft has left Harvard, due to a "series of miscommunications".

Notes

References

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External links

First Draft
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Information Futures Lab

Google News Lab
American journalism organizations

Project description

Notes

See also

References

External links