[VIDEO] Do Journalists Actually Care About Fact Checking?

Sciences Po hosted a two-day event on 12 and 13 January, 2023 about “Content moderation in the age of DSA”. 

During the session “Fact checking and moderation”, Emeric Henry, Researcher and Professor of Economics at Sciences Po, presented a research project funded by the Mc Court Institute. With three colleagues, Julia Cagé, Nathan Gallo and Moritz Hengel, he worked on observing the causal effect of fact checking. To do so, they decided on a partnership with the Agence France Presse (AFP) to collect every morning the stories that would be discussed in the media editorial meetings. They would then observe the effects of the fact checking evaluation done by the AFP on the circulation of the news on Facebook. What the researchers observed, and a good news, is that the stories rated “false” did not circulate that much, but the stories rated “missing content” or “partially false” were unfortunately less impacted by their negative rating. 

The pending question being: “Does fact checking have an impact in the long term in disciplining individuals?”

The conference was organised by the Good in Tech research network, in partnership with the Sciences Po Chair Digital, Governance and Sovereignty, the McCourt Institute, and the MSH Paris-Saclay, with the support of ARCOM, the DE FACTO project, Institut Mines-Télécom Business School and the Sciences Po médialab.

MORE INFORMATION:

• An analysis of the two-day event on “Content Moderation in the Age of DSA”
• Emeric Henry, Professor of Economics at Sciences Po
• Sciences Po's Department of Economics
• The McCourt Institute