In the fall of 2019, I received a grant to travel to Madrid, Spain and embed with a political fact-checker there: Maldita.es. This group of fact-checkers was doing some of the most innovative work around reader-suggested fact-checks, science debunking, and cataloguing members in their “superpoderes” expert system.
About a year ago, Maldita.es began collecting volunteer superpoderes, translated to English to mean readers with superpowers, by asking its audience to fill out a personal profile about themselves and their areas of expertise. On its member site, Maldita says: “Help us debunk rumors with your superpowers: Among the malditas and malditos there is so much vital and necessary knowledge for debunking.”
The result is a database of 425 people with varying skill sets. The team then vets these individuals as actual experts, and, in my two weeks of my fellowship, I watched reporters seek the help of the superpoderes system more than a dozen times. Twelve expert volunteers emerged in just those two weeks, once in as little as 7 minutes.
I looked into how this ground-breaking approach to crowdsourcing is adaptable to other fact-checking outlets the world over. Read the report >>
Other articles from my fellowship with Maldita:
Fact-checking another national campaign only six months later: Maldita.es in election mode >>