5/27/22, 7:10 PM Faster facts: The rapid expansion of fact-checking – News in Asia Crowdsourcing Another emerging trend in fact-checking has been crowdsourcing, with three initiatives using this approach as of January 2021. Cofact in Thailand is the newest crowd-based initiative. It was founded in 2020. It is modelled after Taiwan’s Cofacts, an open-source, collaborative verification platform that connects users and volunteer citizen editors through LINE, a popular chat app both in Thailand and Taiwan. While the impact of Cofact remains to be seen, its predecessor in Taiwan has been at the forefront of combating misinformation with useroriented fact-checking since 2018. Indonesia’s Mafindo was the first to adopt a hybrid citizen-professional fact-checking model in 2015. In 2021 the project has 506 volunteers, 100 students from 20 universities, 12 full-time staff and 15 part-time members, according to a representative who responded to the survey. Academic collaboration Experimentation is taking place in journalism schools across the region as well. Universities are going beyond teaching fact-checking techniques in the classroom to mobilise students for real newsroom work with published outputs. FactRakers at the University of the Philippines-Diliman, Hong Kong Baptist University’s HKBU FactCheck Service and the University of Hong Kong’s bilingual Annie lab newsroom, as well as Japan’s Wasegg at Waseda University, are just some of examples of academic institutions joining the growing community of fact-checkers in the region. Likewise, Australia’s Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology has joined forces with the country’s public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, to create RMIT ABC Fact Check. PHOTO William Warby The term ‘fake news’ is being misappropriated by governments and politicians in Asia to attack the news media they do not like https://newsinasia.jninstitute.org/chapter/faster-facts-the-rapid-expansion-of-fact-checking/ 11/13