About us
Check First is a leading Finnish software and methodologies company, spearheading adversarial research techniques. We believe that everyone should be able to understand how and why content is presented to them. We advocate for online clarity and accountability, building solutions to attain this goal. Partnering with leading institutions, regulators, NGOs and educators, we aim at curbing the spread of disinformation and foreign influence manipulations.
Our mission
We provide stakeholders of the fight against disinformation methodologies, help them create solutions. We bond them together or in projects, give them access to cutting-edge technologies and cooperation methodologies, as well as a secure place to keep all their work. In a nutshell, we are the link/the glue/the binder between those who fights against disinformation in any ways.
7
Projects
8
Partners
16830
Coffees
2020 / Check First started
2021 / ODIL
2021 / CrossOver Belgium
2022 / OKSA
2022 / 22vlalapub.fr
2023 / COM-PRESS
2023 / ObSINT
2023 / CrossOver Francophonie
2024 / CrossOver Finland
Timeline
Check First was founded in the first months of the global pandemic with the intention to help fight disinformation about COVID. Our work was noticed among others by the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, which asked us to build ODIL, the platform gathering initiatives against disinformation in the French speaking world. Since then, Check First was associated to many high-level projects in content monitoring (CrossOver), or political ads monitoring (22vlalapub) as well as in the design of state of the art research tools for data analysis and investigations (OKSA).
Our vision
We sincerely think there is no ultimate antidote that will cure the infodemic we live in. As we all come from different backgrounds, we understand the importance of joining forces in the fight against disinformation. We truly believe in the creation of a virtuous loop between journalists, citizens, policy makers and researchers to fight fake-news : we help them connect, organize and scale up their work. Our solutions aims at instilling the same energy in projects dedicated to the fight against dis and minformation.
Our approach relies on three pillars :
- A standardised constantly improving methodology to spot and debunk fake-news
- A network of disinformation fighters to gather forces and combine skills needed on the battlefield
- A series of tool to help fact-checkers scale-up their work and become more effective in their fact-checks, in a safe environment.
Our methodology is inspired by the greatest fact-checking standards in the world. One can obviously think about the IFCN code of principle, but we also look deeply at other standards applied in different newsrooms as we believe there is no unique ideal way to be a good fact-checkers. We dig deeply into researcher’s work, media literacy content and policy makers publications to ensure a variety of sources that will lead to a plurality of references.
As we train very different profiles of fact-checkers in newsrooms all around the world, our methodology ensures the highest standards of fact-checking but remains understandable and applicable to smaller initiatives and younger journalists. We place transparency and rigorous follow-up at the core of our trainings, while ensuring safety of the fact-checkers and provide them with the latest searching tools and techniques.
Check First is also a network populated by different types of disinformation fighters. We make sure that stakeholders can work together in complete confidence. This pooling of work methods and skills creates a sharing and synergy conducting to intellectual emulation, exchange and the raising of standards in information verification.
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