Lusa Verifica presented as “a public service duty”
Portugal’s state news agency Lusa is launching a new fact-checking service today, called Lusa Verifica. Editor-in-Chief Luísa Meireles has justified it as “a public service duty” and contribution to clarifying public opinion.
“Misinformation now goes far beyond journalism and requires more than the principle of contradiction, a principle that Lusa follows,” he explains.
Journalistic work has produced the new service. It employs techniques and tools that “allow the detection of false and decontextualised information and images, disseminated by increasingly sophisticated technologies that reach everyone,” he adds.
“At this point, it is a public service duty to contribute to this clarification, which the information department fully assumes.”
Chair of the agency’s board of directors, Joaquim Carreira, believes that combating disinformation “is essential for social stability and the health of democratic institutions.”
Therefore, “more than ever, the role of Lusa, whose roots are based on values of trust and credibility, is essential to promote accurate information and counter disinformation.
“By ensuring and improving the accuracy and transparency of information,” the agency “strengthens public trust and contributes to a democratic debate based on facts, directly benefiting democratic institutions and the quality of civic participation and contributing to greater inclusion in society,” he adds.
The agency will adopt the classifications “True”, “False” and“True, but…”, for cases of decontextualisation, applying to the verification of facts for statements and/ or allegations made by national and international officials.
Lusa joins other news agencies that offer this type of service and will begin its certification on the European fact-checking platform (EFSCN, European Fact-Checking Standards Network) https://efcsn.com/ and the international platform – IFCN- International Fact-Checking Network https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/.
Lusa already has a page dedicated to current affairs on disinformation – https://combatefakenews.lusa.pt/ – and has been participating since 2024 in an ISCTE MediaLab project to monitor disinformation during the election campaign.
The agency also belongs to Iberifier, an Iberian project that combats disinformation, which includes more than twenty research centres and universities, the two news agencies in Portugal and Spain (Lusa and EFE), and fact-checkers.
Lusa’s text on this new service makes no mention of social media – arguably the greatest source of disinformation/ decontextualisation. Others – particularly those in the tech industry – will argue that social media is where the real news can be found, and that ‘legacy media’ is simply a tool for propaganda.
Source: LUSA
