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Credibility Coalition

Website:

credibilitycoalition.org
Location:

San Francisco, CA
Type:

News Analysis Organization
Formation:

2017
Co-Founder:

Jennifer Lee 1

References

  1. “Home Page.” Jennifer 8. Lee. Accessed March 14, 2024.  https://www.jennifer8lee.com/

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Credibility Coalition is a self-described news analysis organization that claims to be developing objective metrics to determine the credibility of media outlets. It was founded in 2017 and has support from major media organizations like Twitter, the Associated Press, and Snopes.

History

Credibility Coalition was founded in 2017 by Meedan and Hacks/Hackers. It was originally designed as an event called MisInfoCon, hosted at MIT and sponsored by technology company Mozilla and philanthropies like the Knight Foundation, Craig Newmark, the Nieman Foundation, and First Draft. 1

MisInfoCon is supportive of online censorship under the guise of online trust, verification, fact checking, reader experience, and addressing what it considers “misinformation.” 2 MisInfoCon became an ongoing project, named “Credibility Coalition.” 3 The Coalition is one of several entities working on crowdsourced ratings of journalists’ credibility, and received positive feedback on its approach from Poynter. 4

Parent Groups

Meedan, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco that produces open-source software, monitors the media, investigates human rights issues, and does fact checking. 5 It is also involved in a coalition called Documenting Hate, which built a database of hate crime-related stories. Documenting Hate includes left-leaning groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, The Root, and New America Media. 6

Hacks/Hackers is a network of journalists around the world that works with software experts to develop tools that fight misinformation online. 7

Partners

Credibility Coalition founding partners include the Associated Press, a major media cooperative that has shifted to left-wing terminology in its stories over the last decade; 8 Snopes, a website founded in 1994 to debunk urban legends and has become a fact-checking site; 9 Global Voices, an international media outlet; 10 and Climate Feedback, a climate change journalism organization that analyzes media coverage of climate issues and has been primarily critical of right-of-center outlets. 11 12

Activities

The Credibility Coalition calls itself a research community of journalists, researchers, academics, students, policymakers, and others interested in assessing the credibility of online news and creating standards for that credibility. 13 Events, meetings, incubation, working groups, data collection. 14

In 2017, CredCon released a study called “A Structured Response to Misinformation: Defining and Annotating Credibility Indicators in News Articles.” 15 The study analyzed the credibility of 40 of the most shared climate-science and public-health-related articles. In 2018, it embarked on a project with Trust Metrics and Facebook’s Journalism Project to identify systematic ways to spot misinformation online. The Nieman Lab, which helps fund the Credibility Coalition, described the project as a meta-analysis similar to that of political data scientist Nate Silver, sorting through political polls to determine patterns and assess their credibility. 16

Leadership

Jennifer Lee is a former New York Times journalist and documentary filmmaker. She was a founder of MisInfoCon. 17

Amy X. Zhang is a founding member of the Credibility Coalition and a professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Washington. 18 The Poynter Institute, operator of PolitiFact, named Zhang as an academic on the front lines of “fake news” research in 2018.  19

Connie Moon Sehat is a senior research fellow at the Center for News, Technology, and Innovation and a frequent coauthor with Zhang on topics of credibility in the media. 20

Tanushree Mitra is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington and a specialist in social computing and the socially responsible use of artificial intelligence (AI). 21 She has contributed to several academic articles on socially responsible use of digital technology to the work of Credibility Coalition. 22

Financials

The Credibility Coalition began with $50,000 in seed funding from the Knight Foundation’s Prototype Fund. Additional funding came in 2018 from Google News Lab, the Facebook Journalism Project, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and additional private donors to develop indicators of content credibility on the web and use real-world data to develop training on those indicators.23

Hacks/Hackers reported $749,760 in expenses for the credibility coalition in 2022, nearly half of the total Hacks/Hackers expenses that year. 24

In 2019, the last year it filed, Meedan reported $167,164 in expenses and $271,251 in revenue from its work on the Credibility Coalition and election-monitoring efforts overseas. 25

References

  1. “Home Page”. MisInfoCon. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://misinfocon.com/
  2. Jeanne Brooks. “Misinfocon, A Summit on Misinformation, Feb 24-26, at MIT Media Lab & The Neman Foundation for Journalism.” MisinfoCon. January 25, 2017. Accessed March 14, 2024. https://misinfocon.com/misinfocon-a-summit-on-misinformation-feb-24-26-at-mit-media-lab-the-nieman-foundation-for-232507bd08a6
  3. Meedan. “What’s Next for the Credibility Coalition.” March 20, 2018. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://misinfocon.com/whats-next-for-the-credibility-coalition-554d0588f2bf
  4. Alexios Mantzarlis. “Four Serious Questions about Elon Musk’s Silly Credibility Score.” Poynter. May 24, 2018. Accessed March 15, 2024. https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2018/four-serious-questions-about-elon-musks-silly-credibility-score
  5. “Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax (Form 990). Meedan. 2019. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/270627017
  6. Simon Rogers. “A New Machine Learning App for reporting on hate in  America.” Google News Initiative. August 18, 2017. Accessed March 14, 2024. https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/google-news-initiative/new-machine-learning-app-reporting-hate-america/
  7. Casey Newton. “How an upstart hacker collective is fighting back against misinformation in 2019.” The Verge. January 4, 2019. Accessed March 14, 2024. https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/4/18103447/credcon-credibility-coalition-misinformation-strategy-hackers.
  8. Sherri Kolade.”AP style updates: Can you use the term ‘woke’? PR Daily. June 28, 2023. Accessed March 18, 2024. https://www.prdaily.com/ap-style-updates-can-you-use-the-term-woke/
  9. “About.” Snopes. Accessed March 15, 2024. https://www.snopes.com/about/
  10. “Friends of Global Voices.” CauseIQ. Accessed March 15, 2024. https://www.causeiq.com/organizations/friends-of-global-voices,271918532/
  11. “Home Page.” Climate Feedback. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://climatefeedback.org/
  12. “Home Page”. Credibility Coalition. Accessed March 15, 2024.  https://credibilitycoalition.org/
  13. “Home Page”. Credibility Coalition. Accessed March 15, 2024.  https://credibilitycoalition.org/
  14. “What We Do.” Credibility Coalition. Accessed March 14, 2024. https://credibilitycoalition.org/what-we-do/
  15. Meedan. “What’s Next for the Credibility Coalition.” March 20, 2018. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://misinfocon.com/whats-next-for-the-credibility-coalition-554d0588f2bf
  16. Joshua Benton. “This new project wants to do for news trust what FiveThirtyEight does for polls: Aggregate a bunch of signals into something useful.” NiemanLab. October 31, 2018. Accessed March 14, 2024. https://www.niemanlab.org/2018/10/this-new-project-wants-to-do-for-news-trust-what-fivethirtyeight-does-for-polls-aggregate-a-bunch-of-signals-into-something-meaningful/
  17.  “Home Page.” Jennifer 8. Lee. Accessed March 14, 2024.  https://www.jennifer8lee.com/
  18. “Amy X. Zhang.” University of Washington. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~axz/aboutme.html
  19. Daniel Funke. “These academics are on the forefront of fake news research.” Poynter. May 8, 2018. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2018/these-academics-are-on-the-frontlines-of-fake-news-research/
  20. “Connie Moon Sehat.” International Symposium on Online Journalism. Accessed March 14, 2024. https://isoj.org/connie-moon-sehat/
  21. “Tanu Mitra.” University of Washington. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://faculty.washington.edu/tmitra/
  22. Md Momen Bhuiyan, Amy X. Zhang, Connie Moon Sehat, and Tanushree Mitra. 2020. Investigating Differences in Crowdsourced News Credibility Assessment: Raters, Tasks, and Expert Criteria. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 4, CSCW2, Article 93 (October 2020). ACM, New York, NY. Accessed March 15, 2024. https://homes.cs.washington.edu/~axz/papers/credco_cscw.pdf
  23. Catalina Albeanu. “The Credibility Coalition receives funding from Google, Facebook and Craig Newmark to expand its work assessing trust in journalism.” Journalism.co.uk. March 20, 2018. Accessed March 14, 2024. https://www.journalism.co.uk/news/the-credibility-coalition-receives-funding-from-google-facebook-and-craig-newmark-to-expand-its-work-assessing-trust-in-journalism/s2/a719243/
  24. “Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax (Form 990). Hacks/Hackers. 2022. Accessed March 13, 2024. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/455351484/202301329349301845/full
  25. “Return of Organization Exempt from Income Tax (Form 990). Meedan. 2019.  Accessed March 13, 2024. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/204504068/202013169349305461/full
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Credibility Coalition


San Francisco, CA