Public communication disruption and information accuracy

This paper aims to offer a critical discussion of the various complexities within the emerging field of fact-checking, mainly emphasizing on its central tenets and trends. It also describes some relevant methodological dimensions and empirical insights, presenting the Greek landscape consisted by fact-checking initiatives either based solely on investigative journalism or combining social and journalist research with machine learning, as well as initiatives employing only webbased analytics and verification platforms. The paper concludes that one should not consider factchecking as a panacea against any type of inaccurate information that hits the public sphere (propaganda, fake news, deep fakes), but rather as a method that seeks to provide a coherent framework for the assessment of any important piece of public information, and has a -at least- two-fold aim: first, to upgrade the quality of information circulating in the public sphere, and, second to familiarize the public with the rationale of testing the validity of the information they consume through their daily media “diet”.