ABC News Verify is now providing the opportunity for the public to submit story ideas as well as feedback to its analyses. The unit, which began in mid-July as a replacement to the long-standing association between the ABC and RMIT Fact Check, has a commitment “to investigate, trace and debunk misinformation online and in the media”. It is calling for stories “with the potential to impact a broad and diverse range of communities across Australia”.

Its investigations to date have been more concerned with stories originating overseas: from the shooting of Donald Trump and the spread of racist and sexist social media posts about Kamala Harris, to the controversy around the Algerian boxer Imane Khelif, the race riots in the UK, and most recently, missile strikes in Ukraine.

A story from Australia that attracted its attention in late August took up a proliferation of social media posts about the Linda Reynolds/Brittany Higgins defamation trial. The Verify team were alerted by the similarity of language used, as well as the observation that the accounts were mostly from outside Australia. Their conclusion, endorsed by a Queensland academic, was that the posts were produced by an AI bot as part of a particularly clumsy disinformation campaign.

Objectives for ABC News Verify include training other staff in ABC News in open-source intelligence skills, pointing to the extent to which verification is recognised by many in news media as essential to maintaining the trust of audiences. BBC News Verify, which was unveiled in May 2023, now has a staff of sixty journalists and seeks to verify the authenticity of images used in BBC reports. BBC Verify also fact-checked the claims of politicians during the British general election. This more traditional fact-checking task is not as yet explicitly included in the list of responsibilities for ABC News Verify.  

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