The Fact-Checkers Who Want to Save the World

#TIA – Long live the fact-checkers. History — and we — are on their side.

“Maarten Schenk, cofounder of hoax-debunking site Lead Stories, didn’t set out to be a fact-checker. He wanted to be a trend forecaster. “I wanted, basically, to predict the front page of Reddit,” Schenk, a gregarious blond Belgian, told me over Skype in June. He had created an analytics tool, Trendolizer, as a way to figure out what was popular online and Lead Stories as a way to aggregate the viral news items his tool identified. But the blog didn’t catch on. “Whenever something was trending, all the major other sites were already covering it,” he explained. There was one exception: When Schenk called out lies on the internet, people paid attention.”

Read more at The Ringer