Procedural Strategies by Hong Kong Fact-Checkers

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is April Zhou, whose focus is on visual bias in Hong Kong fact-checkers’ gatekeeping processes. Fact-checking is of course one major response to the challenge of mis- and disinformation, and many fact-checkers have established strategies for the selection and investigation of problematic claims that require fact-checking. Such standardised approaches also serve to legitimise fact-checking organisations, and they can be understood as a kind of gatekeeping practice.

How do fact-checkers select the claims they will address, then? Key factors are empiricism (claims must relate to facts, not opinions); objectivity (avoiding selection biases); and transparency (of the fact-checking process). But how are these applied in practice? It is possible that the kinds of facts that these criteria privilege lead fact-checkers to focus only on a particular subset of problematic information, and may not be sufficient for handling more complex political statements. Such issues have been studied to date mainly by studies engaging in interviews with fact-checkers.

Fact-checkers also often use a number of key methods for publishing their results: rating political claims on a scale from true to false or applying certain standardised labels to claims. How does this work in Hong Kong, then?

This study engaged in document analysis of fact-checking training materials, qualitative content analysis of fact-checks from 2019 to 2023, and in-depth interviews with Hong Kong fact-checkers (AFP Fact Check HK and HKBU Fact Check). It found that despite a variety of labels that could be attached to fact-checks, there was still a major focus on entirely false claims; there was also a very strong focus on image-based fact-checking, and this also matches an emphasis on visual fact-checking in the two organisations’ training materials.

This also aligned with the self-perception of fact-checkers as pursuing an ‘absolute truth’, and ‘absolute impartiality’, and a preference for checking against ‘primary sources’. These preferences may present limitations that complicate the use of fact-checking in the context of more complex political claims, and reflect the limited resources available to fact-checking organisations.