Posted on 13 November 2024 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. Our initial plan had been to publish one fact brief per week on Saturdays but - as happens with many good plans - this turned out to be a somewhat too ambitious target for the project. We therefore took it more solwly and while we sometimes managed to publish a fact brief on consecutive Saturdays, the production rate turned out to be one fact brief every other week on average. Regardless of that, we published fact brief #20 on November 9 and thought that this little milestone might make for a good reason to write a short blog post about this project.

From what we can tell, these bite-sized explanations are 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 big list of fact briefs!

Gigafact is also offering tools to increase "engagement" with the fact briefs. One recently added 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 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.