We are Check First - CheckFirst

About us

We empower the fight against disinformation. Check First is a software and methodologies company founded by a developer and two journalists. We focus on creating the best tools and practices for the peculiar job of countering and monitoring fakes and influence campaigns, and gain time in the process by fostering collaboration. Our best asset is the complementarity of our founding team, making us approach problems in a comprehensive and innovative way.

Our story

Our Services

Training

We offer state of the art training in digital media transformation, content creation, audience targeting for journalism, OSINT techniques and of course, our own tools. Training is provided by a team of experts with 20+ years of experience in the media field.

Open Source Investigation

Need help making sense of the sea of information available online? If it's accessible publicly, we can help. Our team of experts can share their knowledge about the intricacies of the web and find gold mines of information spread out in every corner of the internet. If it exists, we'll find it and help you make sense of it.

Development

Check First is all about finding the best tool for the job. With an experience of 20+ years in software development, our team members will help you organise your data, foster collaboration among your team and help you showcase it to the public or your target stakeholders.

Research

Data is cool. Making sense of it is better. Our strength is the complementarity of our team, coming from both the tech and the media world. Our research is aimed at understanding an issue, following a lead and performing investigations to stress what is relevant.

Monitoring

Accountability is a strong value of our company, and we wish everybody would be accountable. Check First has taken part in successful projects monitoring big platforms to provide researchers with data and make sure stakeholders are delivering what they promised.

Methodologies

Losing time is one of the most frustrating sides of collaboration. We aim at streamlining partnerships and internal work. Having led or participated in large-scale and international operations, Check First can share what we've learned to approach problems efficiently and iteratively enhance our partners' methodologies.

Explore our resources

Check First produces a variety of content, from articles to webinars and training. Below is a repository of our public resources, created during the execution of our various projects.

All resources

Check First publishes its OSINT investigation review process

You might have read some of our investigations, but why should you trust us? In an effort to be as transparent as possible on the way we [...]

Why is “Nazis” regularly trending on Twitter in Belgium?

An analysis showing how Russian official narratives get pushed whenever “nazis” show up on the [...]

Check First is an ally in the fight against disinformation. We gathered skills and knowledge to build a company that is at a corner stone of the fact-checking world.

We are an accelerator. We provide fact-checkers, researchers and policy makers tools, methodologies and solutions to gather their forces in the fight against fake-news.