With projects like CrossCheck and CrowdTangle, Silicon Valley's latest effort to change the world sounds vaguely like a gym for bodybuilders or perhaps a new ticket reselling website. Instead, it's a broad coalition led by Facebook and Google to stamp out fake news during an election cycle.
Not the US election—that already happened, along with plenty of fake news. The battleground this time is France, where 2017's divisive presidential election campaigns seemed to the two tech titans to be an ideal place to test their journalism prowess. The result is CrossCheck, which bills itself as a collaborative verification project that will help voters decide what online content they can trust.
The idea is that the public will submit links to stories whose veracity they question, and CrossCheck's staff will investigate using a variety of new and old media tools and techniques. Journalists from 17 French news agencies will participate, including Le Monde and Agence-France Presse. They'll find and verify content circulating online, including stories, photographs, videos, memes, and comment threads.
Facebook's contribution to the effort is CrowdTangle, a viral content startup that it bought last fall. CrowdTangle is marketed at publishers as a way to identify which stories are likely to be popular online, and thus generate more advertising revenue.
Facebook has faced criticism in the US for allowing hoaxes and other fake news to show up in its trending stories section; it has made repeated efforts to overhaul the section despite Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's claims that fake news did not influence the 2016 presidential election.
In addition to CrowdTangle, CrossCheck participants will also use Google Trends and verification and commenting tools from several other startups like Spike, Check, and Harken. They'll also reference a database of more than 600 French news sites that Le Monde has categorized as "real," "satire," or "fake."
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CrossCheck goes live on February 27, plenty of time before the first round of the French presidential election takes place in May (unlike in the US, France's attention span for presidential campaigns lasts at most for a few months).
"We're excited to be a part of such a uniquely effective and collaborative approach with newsrooms across France to cover one of Europe's most-watched elections," Google said in a blog post. "We're incredibly proud of this partnership and the new model of collaborative journalism it's pioneering."
Google was inspired to participate in CrossCheck based on its experience in a similar project in the US led by ProPublica, called Electionland. While CrossCheck will be limited to France, it's likely that we'll see the tech giant bring what it learns from the project back to the US for future election cycles.