The Cofacts approach
Cofacts gets its name from the concept of collaborative fact-checking whereby the public are invited to join in efforts to identify false information.
One day in September 2016, Cofacts founder Johnson Liang was riding on the MRT, chatting with his school friend Billion Lee, a graduate of National Taiwan University’s Political Science Department. “People pass on rumors, but they don’t Google to find out if they’re true,” Liang said. He then asked Lee to help him write a chatbot program that anyone could use.
Liang used the Airtable spreadsheet to set up a fact-checking database. Lee, who was responsible for verifying content, identified a slew of fake messages daily, but the job proved too much for one person. They needed more fact checking editors.
When Minister Without Portfolio Audrey Tang learned of the situation, she posted a note on her Facebook page announcing that Cofacts needed editors. The post attracted no jobseekers but drew lots of people to the Cofacts website to try to check out misinformation. The surge of interest made Cofacts an overnight sensation, overloading the Airtable database. Consequently, Johnson Liang designed a new database in 2017; furthermore, to apply for a g0v Civic Tech Prototype Grant, he invited his NTU Department of Computer Science & Information Engineering classmates Zucien and GGM to write a proposal. Since receiving the grant, the team has held regular meetings every Wednesday evening.
At 2019’s Oslo Freedom Forum, Cofacts showed how chatbots can be used to verify news reports. (courtesy of Cofacts)