Houthalen-Helchteren Houthalenaar Maarten Schenk with his factcheckingbedrijf Lead Stories Facebook help with the unmasking of ‘fake news’. What started as a small project for the search of trends, is now ‘big business’ has become. “Our focus is on the American news reports that viral”, says Schenk.
In fact, it is martin in the story of Facebook rolled. “A few years ago, I started by way of a hobby to a search for the news virally. I pulled these links through Reddit and a script looked at, then what are the things that look like jumps. Automatically made the program a top 30 of the most viral to the left and that turned out interesting. That script was eventually Trendolizer is a fully-fledged tool with a dashboard to trends to keep an eye on. Later I came in contact with a few Americans here bread in saw and in the end I’m with them gone.”
Presidential elections
Together with Alan Duke, an ex-journalist for CNN from California and Perry R. Sanders (Colorado Springs) started Maarten then Lead Stories on. “We wanted a bit more explanation to ensure the articles that are viral. Why do they do that and what is the background. Writing about popular topics, this was not really the floor because no one there specifically our site for visited… except if we wrote about things that were very wrong. Then we had sudden visitors at the site through Google for answers sought. In the American presidential election of 2016 was the ‘fake news’ is a concept,” says Maarten. Such fabricated news can inuence public opinion. “When we decided to us there full time. And so we finally arrived in contact with Facebook.”
