In The News | Lead Stories

Dutch national radio station NPO1 broadcast an interview with Maarten Schenk about leadstories.com and fake news:

Maarten Schenk jaagt op fakenieuws - De Nieuws BV

De Vlaming Maarten Schenk spoort in zijn dagelijks leven vele soorten nepnieuws op. Maarten heeft software ontwikkeld waarmee hij onjuiste berichtgeving kan opsporen. Vervolgens toont hij de wereld op zijn website leadstories.com welke berichten nep zijn. Aan tafel vertelt Maarten hoe schadelijk nepnieuws kan zijn en hoe de mensen thuis nepnieuws makkelijk kunnen herkennen.

BBC Trending produced two videos in which Lead Stories is featured:

Lead Stories makes a big appearance in this story from The Ringer about fact checking

The Fact-Checkers Who Want to Save the World

Maarten Schenk, cofounder of hoax-debunking site Lead Stories, didn't set out to be a fact-checker. He wanted to be a trend forecaster. "I wanted, basically, to predict the front page of Reddit," Schenk, a gregarious blond Belgian, told me over Skype in June.

Lead Stories took down a plagiarist stealing our fact checks and BuzzFeed documented the whole thing

A Marketing Site Deleted Over 7,000 Articles After It Was Caught Stealing Fact-Checks And Plagiarizing

They messed with the wrong fact checker. Posted on June 14, 2018, at 12:10 p.m. ET Until yesterday, Shawn Rice was one of the internet's most prolific debunkers of online hoaxes. Since at least November 2016, Rice has written thousands of articles about hoaxes for business2community.com, a business and marketing blog.

Trendolizer was a finalist at the GEN Summit Startups For News competition in Lisbon in May 2018

Trendolizer collects thousands of links per day to monitor the web

What did you do prior to launching Trendolizer? Before launching Trendolizer, Maarten, one of the co-founders, worked at weblog software maker Six Apart, and Alan, one of the other co-founders, was a journalist for CNN and Radar Online.

Our #Trendolizer engine just won the Startups for News video pitch battle (https://t.co/S4v6zrqqBc organised by the Global Editors Network #GENinnovate) against #SentiLecto (https://t.co/jKp5zTohxk). Congrats to runner-up @fbalbach! See you at the GEN Summit in Portugal! #ijf18 pic.twitter.com/1hIMH5LDN2

-- Lead Stories (@LeadStoriesCom) April 12, 2018

Our winning video...

Belgian newspaper "De Standaard" about how Lead Stories used Trendolizer to shut down a fake news network from Ghana

Uw nepnieuws komt uit Ghana

Op 17 april 2018 overleed oud-first lady Barbara Bush. Maar de dag voordien al - toen ze dus nog leefde - deed een bericht over haar dood al de ronde op Facebook. 'Dat valse bericht haalde zelfs 2,3 miljoen likes, shares en commentaren', zegt Maarten Schenk, een Belgische softwareontwikkelaar die zich ontpopt heeft tot fake-newsjager op de website Leadstories.com.

Interview in Belgian magazine "Knack" about early detection of fake news with Trendolizer

'We moeten de verspreiders van fake news beter opvoeden'

In het debat over fake news spelen sociale media vaak een cruciale rol. Ze vormen ideale platformen voor mensen die onware verhalen viraal willen laten gaan. Dat ze ook wapens kunnen zijn in de strijd tegen nepnieuws, bewijst Maarten Schenk al enkele jaren met zijn tool Trendolizer (zie afbeelding hieronder), volgens hemzelf een 'uit de hand gelopen hobbyproject', en zijn factcheckingsite Leadstories.com.

2017 German election fact checking project that used Trendolizer

#WahlCheck17: Monitoring the German election with Correctiv.org

By Claire Wardle After working on the US, French and UK elections, we're starting to develop some best practices around monitoring online mis- and dis-information during elections in real time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we plan on supporting newsrooms as they fact-check and report on fabricated and misleading content circulating online in the lead-up to the federal election in Germany.

2017 U.K. election fact checking project that used Trendolizer

How we fact-checked the UK Election in real time - First Draft - Medium

By Ryan Watts, Alexandra Ma and Nic Dias While journalists are now focused on how to debunk disinformation, much less is written about how to monitor what people are discussing on social media, and where and how quickly inaccurate information is spreading.

Poynter review of Trendolizer: "The Tweetdeck for Fake News"

Trendolizer wants to be the Tweetdeck for fake news

Fake news stories are often extremely easy to debunk. Fact-checking " Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump" required little more than an analysis of papal interviews and an email to the Vatican press office. Some fakers don't even bother writing up an article to back up their hoax headlines.

Journalism.co.uk article about Trendolizer and Lead Stories

Lead Stories is debunking misinformation starting to trend on social media

Debunking misinformation and disinformation online is now a point of focus for many news organisations across the world, whether the teams consist of specialised fact-checkers or reporters who are taking on a new task. The small team behind Lead Stories, a website highlighting trending stories on social media, moved towards debunking popular articles online a couple of months ago.