How can you tell fact from fiction on the Internet? Join Truthsquad, a community fact-checking experiment led by NewsTrust, in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity.

Together, we are developing a pro-am network to fact-check political claims during the 2012 elections — and aim to extend this small pilot site into a daily service by early 2012. By combining the Center’s newsroom of investigative journalists with our moderated crowd-sourcing service and contributions from our partners, we hope to provide daily fact-checks, as well as engage visitors as active participants to verify controversial claims. Read more about our plans on the NewsTrust blog and in these recent articles from The Atlantic and Nieman Journalism Lab.

For now, help fact-check controversial statements from politicians, media pundits and public figures on this pilot site. Our editors have picked some dubious quotes below. Are they TRUE or FALSE? Each quote has links to related evidence, which we invite you to review as well. You are welcome to change your answer anytime, as you find more factual evidence. Read more about our new fact-checking form on the NewsTrust blog.

To hear more about the Truthsquad experiment, check our report on PBS MediaShift about what we learned from our first pilots — as well as posts from GigaOM and Craig Newmark.

Our first pilot took place the week of August 2nd, 2010, with the help of our partners at the Poynter Institute and our advisors at FactCheck.org, and with the generous support of Omidyar Network and the MacArthur Foundation. Check our findings from this pilot on the NewsTrust blog — and the article from Read Write Web on NYTimes.com. At the end of 2010, we conducted a second pilot with MediaBugs.org and RegretTheError.com, focusing on statements from reporters or commentators (not politicians). In September 2011, we started a third pilot, to test our new fact-checking form and experiment with new types of claims.

Fact-check these Claims

Give Truthsquad a try. Click on one of the claims below.
(the most recent claims appear at the top of the list.)

To learn more about our latest pilot, check the NewsTrust blog. What should we fact-check next? Suggest a claim for upcoming Truthsquad investigations.

Get started

To join the Truthsquad, follow these simple steps:
1. Pick a claim above
2. Check the links
3. Rate the claim
4. Write a note

For more instructions, read our FAQ or check the NewsTrust blog. Not a member yet? Sign up here.

Learn more

To learn more about fact checking and journalism, check out these guides:

Our goal for this project is to give you new tools for checking information on the web — and help us learn to separate facts from fiction, with the guidance of professionals.

What do you think?

How do you like Truthsquad? Email us with your comments and suggestions. If this pilot is successful, we are prepared to host more Truthsquads on an regular basis, with the help of our partners and members like you.

Support our work
NewsTrust is a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping people find quality news and information online. We are funded by foundation grants and donations from people like you — and are now actively fundraising to offer this service year-round, on a much wider scale than this pilot.

Donate today so we can host more Truthsquads in coming months.


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