How Full Fact’s supporters are training up our fact checking AI

18 Feb 2022 | Full Fact's weekly news

FACT CHECK
How Full Fact’s supporters are training up our fact checking AI

At Full Fact we’re building Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that will help human fact checkers do their jobs faster.

For the first time last autumn, we asked you to help improve our technology by taking part in our “Claim Challenge”.

We were bowled over by the response, with over four thousand readers helping us match 250,000 claims.

But how exactly did all this support help improve our fact checking tools? Our Head of Automated Fact Checking Andy Dudfield explains.

The difference you've made

FACT CHECK
More older people have financial debt—but fewer are actually struggling

“The Labour Party research is likely to raise concern that many pensioners had been struggling financially before this year’s cost-of-living squeeze struck.” - Daily Express, 15th February

It is technically true that 550,000 more pensioners in Great Britain had “fallen into debt” between 2010 and 2020. But this on its own doesn’t tell us whether these people were actually “struggling” with that debt or not.

The same survey found that people over 65 also became less likely to find their debts a problem during this period.

So how did Labour work this out? They directed us to population estimates for Great Britain and to Office for National Statistics data from the Wealth and Assets Survey.

This shows 14% of over 65s had some kind of financial debt in 2010-12, compared to 16% in 2018-20. This 16% of the population in 2020 amounts to about 550,000 more people than 14% in 2010—although this partly reflects the large rise in the over-65 population during this time, from about 10 million to about 12.2 million.

But the proportion saying their debt was “not a problem” rose from 58% to 70%.

Of course things have changed since 2020 and people can struggle financially for reasons besides debt (rises in the cost of living, for example).

However, if you apply the percentages of people over 65 who found their financial debt to be any kind of burden to the population of Great Britain in 2010 and 2020, in the way that Labour did, it suggests that despite the large increase in this group, the absolute number who said they were struggling actually fell by about 17,000 people.

Pensioners and debt

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FACT CHECK
Potential Covid vaccine which used HIV protein was never rolled out

Online claims that the BBC has said that HIV is used to make the Covid vaccines are not true - but do have a kernel of truth behind them.

Social media users allude to a BBC documentary telling the stories of different research teams’ efforts to manufacture a vaccine against Covid.

Within it, they discuss a vaccine developed by the University of Queensland in Australia, which used a spike protein similar to those found on the surface of the Covid virus. This had been stabilised with a small piece of protein from HIV, which was intended to hold the spike protein in its original form, induce a stronger immune response.

However, some people who received trial doses returned false positive HIV test results because they had developed antibodies against HIV. They did not actually have an HIV infection, but the Queensland team’s efforts to develop a vaccine were abandoned due to this issue.

All this is explained in the BBC documentary. But many of the claims shared on social media only clip the segment about developing the vaccine using an HIV protein, not the later segments where it is explained the vaccine was abandoned.

The vaccine was never rolled out beyond the original trial participants, and the vaccines currently in use in the UK do not contain any material from HIV.

The vaccines have nothing to do with HIV/AIDS

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