Lead Stories co-founder Maarten Schenk is our resident expert on fake news and hoax websites. He likes to go beyond just debunking trending fake news stories and is endlessly fascinated by the dazzling variety of psychological and technical tricks used by the people and networks who intentionally spread made-up things on the internet. He can often be found at conferences and events about fake news, disinformation and fact checking when he is not in his office in Belgium monitoring and tracking the latest fake article to go viral. He won the 2020 "De Zesde Vijs" award from Skepp.be, a foundation in Belgium that promotes critical thinking and fights against pseudoscience.

The Trendolizer™ engine which is used at Lead Stories to detect and monitor trending fake news stories is Maarten's brainchild. He is currently the COO/CTO of Lead Stories.

Before co-founding Lead Stories, Maarten worked in speech recognition at Lernout & Hauspie (technology now part of Nuance), project management & blogging at Skynet, weblog software at Six Apart and social media trends at Distractify.

Extra contact info

• Phone: ++32 476 31 07 57
• Skype: schenkm
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maartenschenk/