‘Fact-checking used to be easy’

Almost ten years after Meta decided to create a third-party program to work with news outlets and independent fact-checkers to fight misinformation, the landscape of verification actors is changing rapidly and has become a subfield in its own right. Criteria, methodologies, genres and tools have evolved, and new contesting actors have surged. In this talk, Dr Silvia Montaña-Niño from the News and Media focus area at the Centre of Excellence for ADM+S will discuss the future of fact-checking in the AI age. What does it mean to have social media fact-checking embedded with powerful platform companies, and what skills and professional capabilities are needed to equip this ‘peripheral profession’ over the coming decades?

Dr Silvia Montana-Nino is a Research Fellow at the Queensland University of Technology node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S). Silvia Montaña-Niño received her PhD in Digital Media from the Queensland University of Technology (2020), holds a MA in Politics and the Mass Media, University of Liverpool (UK), and a BA in Journalism and Social Communication from the Pontifical Xavierian University, Bogotá (Colombia). Her research is focused on the influence of metrics and algorithms on journalistic newsgathering, production, and distribution. She also studies the evolution of digital journalism and the interdependencies between social media platforms and news outlets.

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