Catalog: Sources and Facts Clearinghouses
Sites that keep tabs on which media outlets are reliable—and what on the Internet is fake.
This page is one part of the Prism Anti-Misinformation Resources Catalog. See the Table of Contents to navigate to other categories of resources.
Organizations that evaluate and assign reliability scores to news organizations (some also score for ideological bias, which Prism does not vouch for):
List of fake news websites (Wikipedia)
A dynamic, user-edited list of fake news websites, i.e., those which intentionally, but not necessarily solely, publish hoaxes and disinformation for purposes other than news satire.
False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” Sources (Melissa Zimdars, Merrimack College)
A list of more than a hundred problematic news sites, along with tips for sorting the truthful from the troublesome.
Fact-checking organizations in good standing with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN):
Tracking Viral Misinformation (New York Times)
Times reporters will chronicle and debunk false and misleading information that is going viral online.
Viral Rumor Rundown (News Literacy Project)
A dedicated NLP page to collect viral rumors debunked by fact-checking organizations.
Rumor Control (U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency)
This resource is designed to debunk common misinformation and disinformation narratives and themes that relate broadly to the security of election infrastructure and related processes. It is not intended to address jurisdiction-specific claims. It addresses election security rumors by describing common and generally applicable protective processes, security measures, and legal requirements designed to protect against or detect large-scale security issues related to election infrastructure and processes.
Vaccines.gov (U.S. Centers for Disease Control)
An official U.S. Government website to help people learn about COVID-19 vaccines, answer frequently asked questions about them, and find and schedule appointments to be vaccinated.
COVID-19 Misinformation Resources (NewsGuard)
Reporting on the many falsehoods about the virus that are gaining traction online—and the sources that are publishing and spreading those myths.
Vaccine Insights Hub (First Draft)
Live insights, intelligence and reporting guidance on emerging health and vaccine misinformation.
Video: How PolitiFact decides ratings (PolitiFact via YouTube)
A frequently asked question PolitiFact gets is: How do you decide how to rate the claim you’re fact-checking? Here’s the step by step.
Fact-checking and Debunking: A Best Practice Guide to Dealing with Disinformation (NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence)
This report makes a start in examining best practice: what it is, who does it and how it might be evaluated.
Moderating with the Mob: Evaluating the Efficacy of Real-Time Crowdsourced Fact-, Checking (William Godel, Zeve Sanderson, Kevin Aslett, Jonathan Nagler, Richard Bonneau, Nathaniel Persily, and Joshua A. Tucker via Journal of Online Trust & Safety)
Machine learning-based models using the crowd perform better at identifying false news than simple aggregation rules, our results suggest that neither approach is able to perform at the level of professional fact-checkers. Both methods perform best when using evaluations only from survey respondents with high political knowledge, suggesting reason for caution for crowdsourced models that rely on a representative sample of the population.
The global effectiveness of fact-checking: Evidence from simultaneous experiments in Argentina, Nigeria, South Africa, and the United Kingdom (Ethan Porter and Thomas J. Wood via PNAS)
SUMMARY: Fact-checking reduced belief in misinformation, with most effects still apparent more than two weeks later. Fact-checks reduced belief in misinformation by at least 0.59 points on a 5-point scale. Exposure to misinformation, however, only increased false beliefs by less than 0.07 points on the same scale. Across continents, fact-checks reduce belief in misinformation, often durably so.