Interfax joins federal online fact-checking project

Interfax Group has joined a project to counter the circulation of untrue publicly important information via the Internet by acting as an organization providing fact-checking services to major national online communications portals.

The list of the fact-checkers to be involved in the project includes other leading Russian media outlets, such as Itar-Tass, Rossiya Segodnya, RBC, Izvestia, Vedomosti, and others.

Fact-checks shall be initiated by the signatories to a memorandum signed in Moscow on Thursday, i.e., Yandex, Mail.ru , Rambler, the Avito online service, the MirTesen social media platform, the Rutube video service, the Likee short video creation and sharing app, and the Regional Public Center of Internet Technology (ROCIT). In the future, the memorandum could also be joined by other interested online resources, including social networks, news aggregators, and advertising systems.

The memorandum says that the participants intend to develop common tools and rules for detecting and verifying untrue information, as well as subsequently retracting or deleting it.

"Fact-checking has been a basic working principle and informational standard for our agency for more than three decades. We verify the credibility of all news reports on an ongoing basis. The same concerns the information systems developed by Interfax, which have become an industry standard for risk evaluation and due diligence. This is precisely why we are trusted and our information is used in making decisions," Interfax First Deputy CEO Georgy Gulia said.

Interfax Information Services Group is the leading independent provider of news services in Russia, which incorporates Interfax, one of the best-known and most frequently quoted Russian news agencies in the world.

Interfax's newswires cover politics, macro-economy, and issuer event reports, and the agency's correspondents prepare consensus forecasts concerning major Russian companies and follow events on financial markets and changes in the financing and budget policies of Russia and leading countries.

Interfax's clients include leading media outlets, government institutions, and major corporations and banks in Russia and around the world.