By Justina Asishana
I started fact-checking about three years ago, but my focus has been identifying misinformation around health, finance, politics, and general issues. Although I have been reporting issues around climate change, I had never done any climate change fact-checking before the fellowship.
What drew me to the fellowship was my determination to improve my skills in fact-checking, which would also boost my reportorial skills. While we were undergoing the training prior to the commencement of the fellowship, I was almost discouraged when I learned that I would only be debunking false claims and not doing any explainers touching on true claims, which I was skilled at. However, I forged on, noting that if others can do it, so can I.
Four months since the start of the fellowship, despite being stretched, I have learnt a lot. Before now, I would search for claims without focusing on whether they were false, as I would also look into factual claims and offer explainers. Additionally, I was only vast in using TweetDeck and performing basic searches on Facebook, but I have since adopted the use of CrowdTangle, ‘who said what’, and other listening tools to improve my search for misinformation touching on climate change and other topics.
The impact of the project has been enormous. It has broadened my understanding of climate change and the various aspects of covering climate change. It has improved the way I write my fact-checks and also made me learn that there are a lot of minute details that a fact-checker may overlook that can discredit the entire fact-check. This is why it is important to have a fact-check edited and reviewed by others before publishing.
The fellowship has also helped me expand my vocabulary on climate change and made me realize some terms which may seem similar may not mean the same in climate change. It also made me realize how broad climate change is and how it somewhat encompasses every aspect of our lives.
The fact-checks have also helped my organisation boost its readership base and made the audience realize that the organisation is concerned about the high flow of climate change misinformation in society and its resolve to be among those concerned in combating this misinformation.
At first, I thought these fact-checks would not get any interaction once published, but I was wrong, as our audience has commented on and liked the articles and even shared them with their networks.
I hope at the end of the fellowship, I will be more skilled in identifying Climate Change misinformation and effectively combat them.
This is a Fellowship experience post
