Last year Full Fact, Africa Check and Chequeado in Argentina received a $2 million grant from Google.org to support work building a new AI tool to fight bad information.

We’re pleased to be able to share some of the results from this ongoing partnership.

Together we developed new tools to help fact checkers spot potential claims online.

We can use new machine-learning tools to automatically identify checkable “claims” across print, online and broadcast media. At the moment, this averages to around 100,000 claims a day—around 1,000 times more than what we were able to detect previously.

But these tools will only work with good access to data. We continue to call for improved access to reliable and thorough data from government and statistical bodies.

Wednesday's news agenda was driven by government led discussion of a carefully selected preview of a 258 page report.

By the time the actual report was released, media lines had been taken, and much of what the public will take away from it will be based on this selective summary.

The topic of race in Britain is too important and sensitive to treat in this way. 

We, the public, paid for these government communications. They were used to manipulate, not to inform us.

Many journalists chose to go along with it. What they would easily recognise as a crude propaganda technique elsewhere has been reported in places as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened.

This shouldn’t be normal. A press corps that can mount such fierce scrutiny elsewhere does their readers a disservice in playing to the government’s tune. 

Would we accept these tactics again when it comes to a future coronavirus inquiry?

Readers have been asking us different versions of the same question for many months: Is it really true that only 697 people under 60, and without pre-existing health conditions, have died so far of Covid-19?

At the time of writing: yes, this is true.

Others have asked about people without pre-existing health conditions who are under 40. In this group, the total number of Covid deaths is 89.

Some public figures have mentioned these statistics in support of their wider opposition to lockdowns. 

However, it should be pointed out that we've seen these Covid deaths in spite of the lockdowns. As we have said before, evidence suggests that the death toll would have been higher without lockdowns.

And while it is true that the pandemic has disproportionately affected older people, unlike previous large crises, such as the Second World War or the Spanish Flu, people dying of Covid have still lost about a decade of life, on average.

The figures our readers have asked about also only focus on deaths due to Covid. But the pandemic is doing great harm to people who do not die as well—affecting people's health and quality of life across the country in many ways, which cannot be captured in the death toll alone.

On the Today programme, Home Secretary Priti Patel declared the UK’s asylum system “broken," arguing that "60% of asylum claims were from people who are thought to have entered the UK illegally.”

How can we know if this claim is accurate? The truth is that we can’t.

This statistic came from a recently published consultation document. But when asked, the Home Office did not provide Full Fact with the data behind it.

It is inappropriate for the government to use unpublished evidence to support claims. Figures like these should be published in full, so that anyone can check where they’re from and how they’ve been calculated. 

We have asked the Home Office to provide this information through a Freedom of Information request and will update you in due course.

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