Background
Lead Stories was founded in 2015 by multiple people, hotel owner Perry Sanders, CNN journalist Alan Duke and Belgian programmer Maarten Schenk in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The idea for the company came to Duke and Sanders after a conversation in which they agreed that the news in the US had a significant presence of fake news, similar to that published by the National Enquirer. Months after the launch of the company, the couple convinced Belgian programmer Maarten Schenk to fly to Colorado Springs, where he agreed to work for the company. Schenk was responsible for creating a special software named "Trendolizer", Lead Stories used this software to identify and track potential fake news articles and fact-check them if they became too popular. The company reportedly operated worldwide, Alan Duke worked from Los Angeles, Perry Sanders from Colorado Springs and Maarten Schenk from Brussels, Belgium. Lead Stories claimed that it has employees “all around the world”. [5]
In its early days, Lead Stories wasn't a fact-checking website, but a blog and news aggregator that linked viral news stories identified by Trendolizer. Maarten Schenk said the website was unpopular due to the existence of similar sites, so he started debunking viral hoaxes on the site which attracted user attention. Lead Stories was later fully converted into a fact-checking site and stopped aggregating news. [8] In 2018, it was reported that all fact checks on the site were written solely by Shenk, [9] the site's slogan was reported to be "Just because it's trending doesn't mean it's true". [10]
Fact-checking
The company fact-checks articles on politics, technology, world news, and entertainment. It also translated its fact-checks to several languages. [11] [2] In a 2017 interview, Maarten Schenk said Trendolizer tracks 300,000 to 400,000 website pages per day for the Lead Stories website. Articles of websites that have been fact-checked by Lead Stories as fake are listed in a special section, which lists different types of sites such as satirical, prank, clickbait and political sites from both left-wing and right-wing positions. Journalism.co.uk noted that fact-checks of Lead Stories were cited by BBC News and BuzzFeed News this year. [4] In February 2019, Facebook agreed to add Lead Stories as its fact-checking partner, making it one of more than 30 partners on the platform. Lead Stories was tasked with fact-checking flagged Facebook posts. [12] According to its 2019 funding report, Facebook paid the company $359,000. In February 2020, it was reported that half of all fact-checks on Facebook were conducted by Lead Stories. [13]
Staff of Lead Stories received notifications from Facebook within minutes of it detecting suspected misinformation, sometimes it notified them through phone messages. Schenk said the team was given one hour to fact-check each story. [14] In January 2020, during the COVID-19 outbreak, Lead Stories said it noticed a rise of conspiracy theories about the virus on Facebook and other platforms. The company told The Hill that each month, its team of seven full-time fact-checkers debunked 60 to 70 posts. [15] [16] In March 2020, it worked intensively to fact-check fake news about the disease on social media. Alan Duke said some of the company's employees had received death threats from individuals they were fact-checking, causing one of them to quit. [17] In August 2020, TikTok announced that it partnered with Lead Stories and PolitiFact to debunk fake news about the 2020 US presidential election, [18] Lead Stories said it fact-checked "hundreds" of videos containing political misinformation on TikTok. [19]
In January 2025, Mark Zuckerberg ended fact-checking on Facebook, Alan Duke said this decision will make the revenue of Lead Stories smaller and force it to fire a number of employees. The Guardian noted that the company employed 80 people worldwide. [3] Some of the staff did fact-checks in foreign languages, like Hungarian and Ukrainian. [20] Duke said to Wired Magazine that the company usually operated outside of the US and had a "diverse" revenue. [6] Facebook schleduled to terminate its contract with Lead Stories on March 1, 2025, TikTok became the biggest client of Lead Stories afterwards. [20]
On January 28, 2025, IFCN announced that Lead Stories, along with other fact-checking sites, had won "ENGAGE" event and has been awarded $100,000 for their projects to combat misinformation. Lead Stories planned to develop a feature to tag posts on Bluesky that are suspected of containing misinformation, flagged posts will have notices next to them that will be directing users to relevant fact checks. [21] The feature was later implemented by BlueSky and was co-developed by Maarten Schenk. Reportedly, the feature is optional and can be turned off by users; notifications placed on posts do not label their content as "misinformation" but provided "more context". [22]
Incidents
Candace Owens lawsuit
On October 19, 2020, conservative political commentator Candace Owens filed a lawsuit againt Lead Stories for alleged defamation of her in its fact-check debunking her social media comment about COVID-19 pandemic. [23] She also sued USA Today for the same reason. [24] The aforementioned fact-check was published by Lead Stories in April 2020, it debunked a Facebook post in which Owens claimed that COVID-19 death count from the US government was exaggerated, the claim was rated by Lead Stories as “Hoax Alert” and “False”. USA Today published a fact-check about her post shortly after and also concluded that it was misinformation. Facebook then placed a notice on the post warning users that it may contain false claims. [25]
The lawsuit alleged that fact-checks caused Owens financial harm due to her no longer being able to earn income from advertising and promoting her books on Facebook. The lawsuit sued both companies for tortious interference, unfair competition and defamation. [25] In July 2021, Delaware Superior Court Judge Craig Karsnitz dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that it failed to present any evidence that the information in the fact-checks was false or that they were created for malicious purposes. [26] It also ruled that content of the fact-cheks was protected by the First Amendment, meaning Lead Stories and USA Today can not be punished for tortious interference. [25]
In February 2022, Delaware Supreme Court affirmed the judge's decision to dismiss the lawsuit in a two-paragraph ruling. [27] Mike Grygiel, lawyer of USA Today, celebrated the decision, saying he "appericiates" the court recognizing "first amendment’s protection for truthful news reporting". Co-founder Alan Duke said he and his team were "confident" of being legally right, he said the lawsuit lawsuit did not "deter" Lead Stories from fact-checking social media about COVID-19. [28] Law firm Akerman LLP representing Lead Stories claimed responsibility for influencing the decision. [29]
BMJ whistleblower controversy
On November 2, 2021, British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a peer reviewed report that claimed Ventavia, medical company that was responsible for conducting Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trials, of having “poor clinical trial research practices”. The report said it was based on various confidential pieces of information given to the BMJ by a lone whistleblower. On November 10, a number of social media users said that when they tried to share the report, a notice appeared redirecting them to a fact-check by Lead Stories saying the report contained inaccuraties. [30] Reportedly, the report was labeled as "false information" on Facebook and was banned from being shared on the platform. Administrators of several Facebook groups were warned that posts linking the report may be "partially false". Lead Stories' fact-check, titled Fact check: The British Medical Journal did NOT reveal disqualifying and ignored reports of flaws in Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trials, said that the information in the report was false because Pfizer "analyzed" the claims and found no evidence of wrongdoing, it also cited a statement from Food and Drug Administration that said: "the benefits of the Pfizer vaccine far outweigh the rare side effects". [31] [32]
Howard Kaplan, author of the report, criticized Lead Stories on social media, calling it "Facebook Thought Police" that "doesn’t like the wording of the article by the BMJ". The BMJ later contacted Lead Stories to request the article be removed, it claimed the fact-check itself contained errors, including calling the BMJ a "news blog". Alan Duke declined the request, saying the misinformation notice was created Facebook and they are not responsile for it, he also added that the report was used by anti-vaccine activists. The BMJ then proceeded to sent an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg. [33] Written by two editors, Fiona Godlee and Kamran Abbasi, the letter called Lead Stories' fact-check "incompetent", saying it contained various issues like failing to say what information in the report was false and having phrase “hoax alert” in the article's URL despite no evidence of it being one. [34] Meta Platforms and Zuckerberg did not take any action, the BMJ was told they may appeal the misinformation label within a week to the relevant company (Lead Stores) and that Facebook was not involved in making the decision. [35]
Lead Stories responded to the letter in December 2021, saying the report was invalid because the whistleblower, whose name is Jackson, was unreliable. It said she had little quafiications in science and only has “30-hour certification in auditing techniques”. Lead Stores also said Jackson held negative beliefs towards vaccines based on her Facebook posts and criticised the BMJ for failing to note it. On December 20, 2021, Lead Stories said to the BMJ on Twitter that the report was republished on the website of Childrenʼs Health Defense, anti-vaccine activist group, saying its run by "disinformation dozen". It criticized the BMJ and recommended it to review its editorial policies. The BMJ later filed a complaint to Poynter Institute, which runs IFCN, the fact-checking network of which Lead Stories is a member. The BMJ said the conduct of Lead Stories broke IFCN's guidelines. [35] Electronic Frontier Foundation condemned the incident and criticised Facebook's fact-checking process in response. [36]
Reception
In 2019, Vox said that Lead Stories, and other Facebook fact-chekers, had a reputation of "nonpartisanship and accuracy". [37] HuffPost said in 2020 the website was "making the rounds on the internet". [38] MBFC described Lead Stories as a reliable and unbiased source, [39] Fox News described it as one of Facebook's "prominent fact checkers". [40] Conservative website NewsBusters criticized the website, alleging it fact-checks right-wingers four times more than left-wingers. [41]
In February 2022, Joshua Peters of the Carolina Journal said Lead Stories has "selection bias" because it reportedly fact-checks right-leaning political content three times more than left-leaning. He also said that one of its fact-checks, which debunked Fox News story, was misleading and violated IFCN's guidelines. [42] In May 2024 report, Capital Research Center (CRC) described Lead Stories as "practically a CNN-offshot", saying half of its staff is affiliated with the channel. Citing Federal Election Commission data, CRC also noted that about a quarter of its employees donated to Democratic politicians, with Perry Sanders donating $3,700 to Hillary Clinton in 2016. [43]
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
