Rumours have it that the EJTA project EUfactcheck is definitely going to stop after 26 May 2019. The political debates died down, the EU elections are all over. However, we consider the rumours to be false. Why would EUfactcheck continue to exist when there are no more election campaigns? That’s the argument behind the gossip…
On the 12th of May 2019, Maltese leader of the Nationalist Party, Adrian Delia, stated in Times of Malta that the upcoming European elections are “a referendum on abortion.” He continues that every seat going to the Labour Party would be a seat in the European Parliament in favour of abortion. Malta is the only…
AWAITING ELECTION RESULTS WE REPOST OUR MOST QUOTED FACT-CHECK On March the 4th Dutch leader of the right-wing Forum for Democracy Thierry Baudet reacted to a statement by liberal politician Rob Jetten about homophobia in The Netherlands. Baudet stated on Twitter: ,,Jetten’s anger about the increased homophobia in The Netherlands is justified, but he doesn’t…
On May 21st, during a political talk show on Italian television, Silvio Berlusconi said that, under his governments, Italy reached the lowest tax to Gdp ratio in the last 20 years, getting to 39%. This is mostly true.
Danilo Toninelli, Italian Minister of Infrastructure and Transport, made a number of claims the 30th April of 2019 referring to different economic aspects. First, that employment rates are the highest since April 2008. Second, that unemployment has fallen 0.4 points. Third, that unemployment among young people is the lowest in Italy since 2011, and fourth, that…
Dutch MEP Agnes Jongerius recently tweeted that the Netherlands has the most flexible labour market in Europe. Jongerius, MEP for the Labour Party (PvdA) speaks of a ‘flexible labour market’, but what is the exact definition? On March 2017 the University of Amsterdam published a report in which ‘flexible labour market’ is given an understandable…
With Brexit raising tensions ever higher in the British political landscape, talks of reuniting Ireland and Northern Ireland have surfaced again. In a 2016 document titled ‘Towards a United Ireland’, Irish political party Sinn Fein outlined how the reunification of Ireland and Northern Ireland might not be as costly as is popularly believed. Outlining the…
On March 7 2019 an article called ‘sustainable thinkers are often the biggest polluters’ was published by the Dutch RTL News. In that article, they link pollution to sustainable thinking. Sustainable thinkers would be above-average polluters. This is what the author of this article wrongly concludes from a research of Peter Kanne, member of I&O…
On the 30th of April, an article was posted on the website of Sp.a, the Belgian social democratic party, about air pollution. Kathleen Van Brempt, a Belgian politician and member of the European Parliament, stated in this article that 98% of the EU’s urban population is exposed to ozone levels that exceed WHO guidelines. The…
The current European agricultural policy runs until 2020. The discussions about this policy for 2021 have therefore started. Following this discussion, Menno Bentveld, a reporter at the Dutch national radio station NPO Radio 1 called Bas Eickhout, MEP on behalf of GroenLinks. Eickhout claimed that 80 percent of the European agricultural money goes to the…
In Georgia, European Parliament election 2019 has been covered in traditional media outlets, and in online and social media as well. Traditional media outlets mostly focused on the actual election days, while the election campaigns got less attention. The same approach was applied in part of online/social media too. We monitored major TV stations and…
Most students, deeply entrenched in data research, have ‘grabbed’ for pizzas, at some time or another. So have I. Over the past three years I’ve been on the other end of the table, coaching young fact-checkers on their journeys to yet another election. Helping them to find their way in heaps of data, supporting them…
The Netherlands were one of the first to vote in the European parliamentary elections, on Thursday 23 May. The weeks ahead of the voting day are always filled with political statements and confused voters: who do you vote for and where do you vote? After all it is an ordinary working day and some people…
Leader of the political party Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), Isa Mustafa, tweeted on the 17th of June 2017 that his Kosovan party is a member of the European People’s Party, the largest political group in the European Parliament.
On 7 March 2019 the Dutch website RTL News published an article titled: “Sustainable thinker often the worst polluter”. The article claimed that several connections could be made between sustainable thinking and polluting behaviour. In other words: those who claimed to worry about the environment were often the ones who polluted more.
The world community is concerned about possible interference in election process. The expected threat comes from definite counties, but is there another stakeholder, interested in elections outcome as well as governments, and similarly powerful?
In a Brexit Party rally in April 2019, Nigel Farage claimed according to the Daily Mail: “What we are now fighting for is much, much, bigger than Brexit […] what we are now fighting for is for the survival of the very principle of democracy in this country.” This statement refers to a conceived lack…
With great enthusiasm we started the European Factcheck project this winter. Working together with 19 J-schools in 15 European countries is interesting. Besides that, we underline the bigger aim of this project: teaching students verification skills to become eager journalists to make ‘a better world’. Students don’t always like doing research but when you say…
During the US election campaign in 2016, many false messages were spread on Facebook. Also in Germany the distrust of information in social networks is high: According to a study by the European Commission in February 2018, around 60% of all Germans surveyed do not trust news and information in social media. Facebook responded to…
We discovered the survey YES! due to an article published in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia that talked about a project run up by young people for young people. We thought that the idea was innovative, and it was a good way to make young people voices heard and vindicate their claims as well. Results…
EUFACTCHECK is the fact-checking project of the European Journalism Training Association (EJTA) that intends to build a sustainable curriculum unit on fact-checking within a European network of Journalism schools.
We will publish fact-checks and blog posts to test our common methodology during the European elections.
The project gathers fact-checks from more than 150 students and staff from more than 20 EJTA schools.
Through fact-checking European political claims and trying to tackle misinformation, we want our students and our public to grow a deeper insight and interest in democratic processes, both on national and European level.
EUFACTCHECK wishes to motivate fact-based debate in the EU and to stimulate media and information literacy.
“What is this politician saying??” Did you read or hear a politician or public figure make a questionable claim? Send us an email with the claim and maybe we will fact-check it.
Please include the source (url and date) where you found the claim.
