yazIam

Now that video deepfake technology exists, most videos are not acceptable evidence on SourcedFact. There are exceptions. One example is a video of someone speaking validated by that same person. Say Trump tweets a video of himself at a campaign rally. In that video, he says X. That video would be acceptable evidence for claims that "Trump said X".

As deepfake technology gets more developed, I think people will trust video evidence less and less. This will definitely mean that some incidents that are proven by undoctored video are denied. This is definitely going to suck, but I think it's happening. I sincerely hope that people start working on tech to solve the deepfake problem. I'd love to contribute to that myself, but want to focus on what SourcedFact is doing first - allowing journalists to share evidence and reasoning for documented evidence. If I ever feel that that battle is won, I'll definitely jump into the deepfake problem as well. Rather do one thing really really well, than many things poorly.

By "open source" fact checking I mean that every claim comes with a reviewable fact checking page that includes both the primary source evidence and the reasoning behind why that evidence proves that claim. Really I'm stealing the term "open source" from software here and defining it to mean reviewable fact checking. Check out any of the articles here to see what this reviewable fact checking looks like!

> Where do the articles come from?

Currently I work with a team of fact checkers to produce the content. Any journalist or concerned citizen is welcome to submit content if they like, as long as they always back it with reviewable fact checking. Anyone is free to use this concept of "open source" fact checking on their own sites, and I'd happily help journalists who would like to adopt it.

Just because they're selecting a Presidential candidate right now. You're welcome to start a project on a different topic if you like of course, as long as the claims are backed with primary source evidence. DM if you're interested.

Though, this is just the current topic we're working on, as you can see on the site, we've done many others, and will do many more in the future.

Self funded so far. At first it was just me coding. I eventually recruited a small team of paid fact checkers and got them using the platform. The SourcedFact that you see now is the result of the learnings from working with these fact checkers.

I deeply believe that making it as easy for journalists to share every step of their fact checking process with their readers will help the best journalists and the best information stand out in this sea of noise. So even though I may start looking for sources of funding soon, worst case scenario I’ll keep funding SourcedFact to the best of my abilities. 

Edit: Added second paragraph