Repustar Launches Significant Initiative to Combat Election-Related Misinformation on Social Media Platforms
Summary
The main goal of the initiative—dubbed #MakeFactsCount—is to recruit one thousand volunteers to monitor social media threads looking for possible misleading links or stories about voting and elections, and give them the tools to intercept the misinformation. “ Our goal is to mobilize a skilled group of volunteers to become the front line in the defense against misinformation in the critical four weeks before some of the most consequential and contentious elections in recent U.S. history,” said Chandran Sankaran, Repustar Founder and CEO. “ We’re giving volunteers a concrete way to address the misinformation thats clogging everyones social media channels,” added Repustar editorial director, John Marcom, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Forbes, who later led the international businesses of Time Inc. and Yahoo. Free weekly Zoom seminars for volunteers conducted by Marc Ambinder, an expert on election security and disinformation, are another feature of the #MakeFactsCount initiative. Repustar relies on a unique social-media-connected publishing platform that simplifies and opens up the process of fact-checking to the growing number of professional fact-checking organizations as well as the many thousands in the general public who are fact-checkers at heart.