Posted on 21 October 2025 by BaerbelW

In April 2024 we announced the (renewed) collaboration between Gigafact and Skeptical Science to create fact briefs, short but credibly sourced summaries that offer “yes/no” answers in response to claims found online. Initially, we published new fact briefs on Saturdays, but switched to Tuesdays earlier this year and while we try to have a new fact brief out each week, we sometimes miss a week due to time constraints and vacations. Regardless of that, we published fact brief #50 - Are humans responsible for climate change? - on September 30, 2025 and thought that this little milestone might make for a good reason to write a short blog post about the current status of this project.

From what we can tell, these bite-sized explanations are still useful to people - at least they collect quite some likes and get shared on various social media platforms once we put up a post there. Another intriguing aspect of this collaboration with Gigafact is, that we are part of their network of news outlets and some of our fact briefs have for example been republished by Wisconsin Watch among their own fact briefs!

In addition to having the fact briefs available as blog posts on Skeptical Science, I also started creating short 2 minute videos, each with a collection of 10 fact briefs all available in one playlist, announced in the blog post Making fact briefs available as videos on Youtube in May. The main purpose of these "videos" is to have a means to link to fact briefs from Youtube-comments for quick debunkings where links to other sources usually causes the comment to disappear immediately. Since May, two more videos for fact briefs 31 to 40 and 41 to 50 have been added to the playlist.

Gigafact is also offering tools to increase "engagement" with the fact briefs. One option is an easy means to customize a little quiz which utilizes the available fact briefs of a partner organization. Players can click through the randomly displayed fact briefs and pick "Yes" or "No" for each of them. At 10 question intervals they see their results and can decide whether or not to keep playing. Gigafact partners have an option to also display "cards" with either a link to sign-up for a newsletter or support the website with a contribution. Want to give it a try? Click the image below or here:

Thanks to the Gigafact team for including us in this neat collaborative project! Special thanks go to Sue Bin Park for writing most of the fact briefs, to Austin Tannenbaum for editorial comments and Robyn Sundlee for overall project support and Sean Vanderaa for technical support! On our side, this project has only been possible due to the dedication of our late team member John Mason and - after John's untimely passing away - Ken Rice helping with getting the science right.

The list of all now 50+ fact briefs published since April 2024 is available on Skeptical Science and a list also including the output from the initial collaboration with Repustar in 2021 is available on the Gigafact website.