{"id":63744,"date":"2012-11-01T14:38:30","date_gmt":"2012-11-01T12:38:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=63744"},"modified":"2012-11-01T15:18:11","modified_gmt":"2012-11-01T13:18:11","slug":"fact-checking-site-launched","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/internet\/63744-fact-checking-site-launched.html","title":{"rendered":"Fact-checking site launched"},"content":{"rendered":"

Africa’s first fact-checking website, invented by the AFP Foundation<\/a>, has been launched, the journalism department at Wits University said on Thursday.<\/p>\n

“To our knowledge, this is the first time anyone has tried to do something like this, here in Africa,” AFP Foundation deputy director Peter Cunliffe-Jones<\/a> said in a statement.<\/p>\n

“For any society to function properly, people need access to reliable information and that includes Africa,” he said.<\/p>\n

“Whether the claims people make are about health, politics or the economy, they should be checked properly and impartially.”<\/p>\n

The site Africa Check, based in Wits’ journalism department, was established to spread the skills and practice of fact-checking among students and media houses.<\/p>\n

Caxton professor of journalism at Wits Anton Harber<\/a> was a senior adviser to the project.<\/p>\n

He said: “I believe that Africa Check can make an important contribution to public discourse by promoting a culture of accuracy and making public figures think twice about playing loose with the facts.”<\/p>\n

The project would be funded until the end of the year by the IPI News Innovation Contest, run by the Vienna-based International Press Institute.<\/p>\n

The site can be found on www.africacheck.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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An African fact-checking website has been launched by the AFP Foundation<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":63746,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[36,16594,16598,16596],"class_list":["post-63744","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","tag-active","tag-afp","tag-africacheck","tag-fact-checking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63744"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/33"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63744"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63744\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63754,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63744\/revisions\/63754"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}