For GIJN’s My Favorite Tools series, we spoke to Brazilian journalist Tai Nalon, CEO and co-founder of online fact-checking site Aos Fatos. Aos Fatos founded in 2015 through Nalon and his colleagues Rômulo Collopy and Carol Cavaleiro, Argentine online page Chequeado, PolitiFact of the Poynter Institute and Fact Checker of the Washington Post.
The concept of the platform grew out of Nanon’s general dissatisfaction with the policy he had given to Folha de São Paulo, Brazil’s largest circulation newspaper. There deserves to be something similar permanently.
In addition to Folha, Nalon has worked for several media outlets in Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and São Paulo, such as the magazines Globo g1, Veja and Piauí, with a specific focus on national politics, public policies and transparency. In 2009, she was nominated for the New Journalism Award. ” When I look back and think about what led me to journalism, I don’t know how to do it, because I never imagined that I would have a vehicle of my own and that I would gain foreign prominence,” says Nalón. .
His concept of good fortune in 2004, when he entered the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), was quite different. “I sought to paint in Folha, and I painted in Folha, and I sought to cover politics, and I covered politics,” he explains. “But I also joined a large newsroom right at the time of the 2008 crisis, so I think I just experienced this slow downsizing and downsizing procedure [of major newspapers],” he adds.
“I don’t think it made much sense to bet long-term on a newspaper,” he says. “It’s not that it was very sensible to bet on a start-up, with the rest of the savings I earned after my dismissal and a complicated crowdfunding strategy. It took a while for it to work, and in fact, it almost didn’t work.
It took Aos Fatos 3 years to achieve a solid income, says Nalon. “But in another context,” he says. Declarative journalism [which uncritically reproduces statements from official sources] is already a problem, but we didn’t have the same old liars in governments. “According to her, only after the rise of Trump in the US did it become more than possible. It began to gain prominence beyond journalism, a progression that contributed to the site’s growth.
According to her, the other explanation for Aos Fatos’ good fortune is its investment in technological and innovation projects, such as its own equipment and services. Nalon now leads an award-winning team of more than 20 people.
We asked Nalon about the equipment and techniques he uses to the fullest for fact-checking. These come with the trusty TinEye and Wayback Machine and, of course, the equipment produced through Aos Fatos, but it also lists some undeniable ones that are available to those who need to get into fact-checking. Here are some of his favorite teams.
The Aos Fatos radar is a real-time disinformation monitor suitable for Portuguese media. Its set of rules maps platforms, looks for keywords and linguistic patterns common to disinformation campaigns, which helps bloodhounds map in real time what is going viral on express topics. , such as coups or COVID-19 and vaccines. It can also identify whether the same false narratives are spreading through networks and apps, and how they are interconnected.
“Radar wants to go through innovations in its usability,” he says, “but its public face manages to show in a very complete way the messages of high probability of incorrect information circulating on platforms such as WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. “
Radar is open to partnerships for investigations, such as the recent collaboration between Agência Pública, a member of GIJN, and Núcleo Jornalismo in the 2022 Brazilian elections, or the investigation carried out for the Washington Post for a report on electoral disinformation in Brazil. If you are a journalist or researcher, you can also contact the Aos Fatos team and request databases through radar@aosfatos. org. Aos Fatos operates a “loosemium” service: it is easy to use for some sectors and has a paid edition for others.
Currently available on WhatsApp and Telegram, Fatima, derived from “FactMa,” short for “FactMachine,” allows readers to check if certain online data is false and locate the corresponding verification. other functions in the topic consulted, or the user can search for a new keyword”. it’s rarely very open,” Nalon says. (WhatsApp and Telegram are encrypted, but based on what users ask Fatima, it’s possible to figure out what topics and possible erroneous data are trending on those platforms. )
The Telegram edition evolved for the 2022 Brazilian elections, in partnership with the Votorantim Institute. “Today, our goal is to refine Fatima’s responses to user queries and improve the crowdsourcing built into our own content control system,” says Nalon.
Also evolved through Aos Fatos, Escribe is a tool that automatically transcribes giant audio and video files into Portuguese, English and Spanish (the interface is in Portuguese) that can be used for interviews and media circulating on WhatsApp and YouTube.
“First of all, we wrote Scribe that was developed in an internal request for a tool that would help us monitor, for example, the public appearances of former President Jair Bolsonaro,” says Nalon. One advantage, according to her, is that Escribe was developed for Brazilian Portuguese, which is rarely discovered in the market.
The service has a monthly payment of R$ 50 (about US$ 10), with subscriptions for Americans and companies. The payments fund Aos Fatos’ journalism.
Nalon uses such technological equipment, which has similar purposes, to locate domain owners, their addresses and IP addresses as a starting point for investigations. “The tool does research and brings up data, if available, about the owner of the site in question, if they own other sites, if AdSense codes and other programmatic advertising equipment are shared,” Nalon says. (For more information on data in the Who. Is database and investigating the origins of the online page, see GIJN’s virtual infrastructure bankruptcy in our Digital Threat Reporting Guide. )
The team has already helped Aos Fatos identify online page owners posting misinformation, the monetization team they use, and whether websites use the same monetization tool, which she says could mean that posts are coordinating to create propaganda campaigns.
When comparing the two teams, BuiltWith has some additional paid features. But Nalon says the teams complement each other: “Sometimes it’s smart to know they exist, because if one doesn’t provide up-to-date information on the online domain owners page, the other would possibly do so. “
SimilarWeb is a tool used to measure the audience of an online page and allows you to see the access history -such as who accessed and how many perspectives you have- of sites that publish erroneous information. The knowledge isn’t very accurate, but it gives an idea of how many other people are affected by misleading articles on certain sites,” says Nalon.
This can be a smart starting point for understanding the interests of safe misinformation: “If a site has a large audience, uses programmatic advertising equipment of all kinds, and publishes misinformation, it surely makes money by misleading others.
For Nalon, the Access to Information Act (LAI), Brazil’s equivalent of FOIA, is a difficult tool for investigating public spending on advertising and, ultimately, disinformation. “If the government is transparent, it will account for its classified ads on Internet sites. and social networks: how much you spend, where you centralize spending, which corporations have been hired to take care of the communication of certain campaigns, “he explains. All those main points can form the basis of a clever fairytale idea, Nalon adds. .
She posits a prospective way to use this law to investigate public policy disinformation: “A politician says he did anything. It then requests the execution of a secure contract through LAI, which shows anything else. In this way, it may turn out that the Politician does not tell the truth.
It is vital that the bloodhounds make use of what the law guarantees them and persevere in the face of ill will or attempts to hide the fact disguised as bureaucratic excuses. Imagine perceiving what decisions are made and how public policies are defined,” he adds.
Ana Beatriz Assam is a Portuguese editor of GIJN and a Brazilian freelance journalist. He worked for the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo as a freelancer, basically covering stories with knowledge journalism in the political section. He has also worked with the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalists Journalism (Abraji) through major journalism courses.
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