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J. Walter Thompson Helps Fight Fake News In France With Human-Powered Search Engine

Apparently fake news is a thing in France, too. And apparently it was rampant during the run up to the just concluded presidential election. Emmanuel Macron won by a large margin but it seems there was a lot semi-truths being thrown about.

To help combat the spate of fake news surrounding the election, J. Walter Thompson Paris worked with French news organization Liberation to create CheckNews.fr , a search engine staffed by actual human journalists for three days leading up to the election. These journalists answered any search query made with links to multiple sources providing truthful answers to each query.

Just below the search box, the site reads, "'Is France becoming an Islamic republic?', 'Is Emmanuel Macron backed by Saudi Arabia?', 'Is the Euro raising prices?' Search engines give us millions of unverified results. Despite Web Giants’ actions against fake news, disinformation is still spreading across the Internet. What are journalists going to do about it? Get back to you in a few hours, just enough time for them to dig, investigate and cross-reference."

You can watch a video (in French with English subtitles) describing the project here

 

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