In the battle against disinformation, fact checkers are the first line of defense. Yet, a recent study reveals these individual face some serious barriers in completing their tasks. The principal problem is the procedures that govern how their job have not kept pace with the volume of information. As a result, “the rate at which misinformation can be fact-checked is much slower than the speed at which it is generated.”

The above quote comes from an article about the study published by the NYU Tandon School of Engineering. Researchers from the NYU Centers for Cybersecurity in Brooklyn and Abu Dhabi were part of the study team that interviewed 21 professional fact-checkers from 19 countries. As the diagram illustrates, the participants identified a number of challenges in their work processes. Among the concluding result was that “unified and collaborative computational tools” were needed to “empower the human fact-checker in the loop.”

The results of the study were published in the April 2022 issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction. Nicholas Micallef, a postdoctoral researcher at NYU Abu Dhabi, was the principal author. Other members of the research team were Dr. Nasir Memon, the co-founder of NYU’s Center for Cybersecurity in Brooklyn, Vivienne Armacost of Indiana University in Bloomington, and Sameer Patil of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City. To read the NYU article, click here.