The article dealing with fact-checking in Venezuela was written by Regina Cazzamatta from Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology and Augusto Santos from University of Erfurt examined the challenges Venezuelan fact-checkers face and how they cope.
The history of fact-checking organizations starts from the US in the early 2000s and has expanded vastly with the rise of post-truth politics in 2016. In Venezuela, official data tends to be unreliable – necessitating fact-checking, even if Venezuelan organizations cannot afford the $200 annual application fee for the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN).
Venezuela serves as a case study on how fact-checkers operate in a politically constrained and media-restricted environment. The study employed a multi-method approach, combining qualitative interviews (n=6) with quantitative content analysis of debunking articles (n=1178).
Venezuela used to have “a vibrant media ecology with a variety of newspapers, television stations, and a robust radio sector” (Marchesi and Lugo-Ocando 2024, 281). Hugo Chávez changed all that by gradually eroding media freedom in favor of state propaganda. An “anti-hate” law further has been used to sanction journalists criticizing powerful figures.
One outcome of the repressive regime is the growth of fact-checking organizations in the country. They operate as NGOs due to the captured nature of the media. Nevertheless, they represent a concerted effort to preserve veracity in a restricted system.
The research questions were:
RQ1: What are the primary challenges that Venezuelan fact-checkers face when verifying potential false information?RQ2: What strategies do Venezuelan fact-checkers employ to navigate these challenges?RQ3: Given the identified challenges, how do fact-checking practices in Venezuela differ from those in other Latin American countries, regarding misinformation sources, targets, channels of misinformation spread, and evidentiary documents?
The constraints were political – including legal repression and government scrutiny; informational – including the lack of legally mandated reports from the government and lack of official sources; financial, journalists being underpaid and as a result, fact-checking teams being small; and operational – lacking access to verification tools such as Google Street View or lack of international tools that many fact-checkers rely on.
Fact-checkers coped by collaboration with each other or NGOs, some of them international. This helped them to share news and to circumvent technological barriers. They also sometimes withheld authorship and removed bylines, and were ready to do emergency data-wipes on their devices when targeted by the police.
When compared to other South American countries, Venezuela and Argentina focused more on public figures as targets. Venezuelan fact-checkers relied the least on national documents – understandable from the context. Instead, NGOs and international sources were relied on.
In conclusion, Venezuelan fact-checkers faced general challenges not unlike in Bali or China, but there were specific aspects here. First, Venezuelan fact-checkers could not apply for grants from American tech companies due to US sanctions. Second, collaboration with other media outlets was severely curtailed. Third, direct censorship further restricted their reach. Finally, the “anti-NGO” laws has intensified risks, prompting secrecy of funding.
The article “Fact-Checking in Venezuela: Navigating Authoritarianism, Media Collapse, and Economic Crisis to Counter Misinformation” by Regina Cazzamatta and Augusto Santos is in Journalism Studies. (Open access).
Picture: Barquisimeto, Lara, Venezuela by roger kuzna @pikadzu.
License Unsplash.
