1. Jan 16, 2020

On January 6, Vishvas News Team's Fact Checker (Employee ID PN0058) had done a fact check story on the viral 3D image of Australian map showing the intensity of bushfire. The image was also going viral with a fake claim saying it was taken from a NASA satellite. The Fact chcker who was working on the story (Employee ID PN0058) had done the investigation properly following all the guidelines and got a quote from the creator of the 3D image who confirmed that the image was produced using the bushfire data provided by NASA. Below is the URL of the Vishvas News story-
https://www.vishvasnews.com/world/fact-check-australia-bush-fire-viral-image-does-not-shared-by-nasa-but-is-graphic-image-which-is-being-circulated-with-fake-claim/

Vishvas News works as the Third-Party Fact Check Partner with Facebook. If the viral posts are takem from Facebook, Vishvas News (after the completion of fact checking process) rates the post as - False, True, Misleading on the basis of the fact-check outcome in the story. There is a separate guideline to follow to rate the posts for Facebook, as some images are correct but the claims with the images are either fake or misleading, and sometimes both images and the claims are incorrect. In these scenarios Vishvas News goes with the options - either 'On single post' or 'identical content' optons. In the above story, the image was absolutely fine in the Facebook post, but the description used with the image was incorrect, and the same was mentioned properly in the story done by the fact checker author. But, during the story rating process, the author marked the story as 'identical content'. As a result, some Facebook users received message of 'fake image fact-checked by an Independent fact-checker' even if they used the correct description with the image. Vishvas News was not able to correct the rating due to a technical issue which we faced because the user mentioned in Vishvas News story had deleted his Facebook post. It took a week day time to resolve the technical issue, and it was fixed on Jan 15.

Vishvas News received 13 appeal mails by different Facebook users due the 'identical content' issue. All of them had used the image with the correct description with the image but received 'fake image' message due to the technical glitch. Vishvas News contacted all of them in separate mails and explained the issue on January 9. And, once the issue was resolved, Vishvas News again sent a confirmation mail to all of them.

The Vishvas News fact checker (Employee ID PN0058), who rated the post with incorrect option, was asked to explain (why it happened) in an official mail and the required action was taken against her as per the guidelines and policy after her response.

2: June 4, 2020, Vishvas News Team's Fact Checker (Employee ID PN0058) did a story on a video in which it was claimed that there are ongoing protests in Amritsar on the demand of Khalistan. In our investigation, we found that the video is from 2016 and nowadays there is no such Protest happening there. Following our SOP, we published the news, but on the same day we found that the second part of the video is not from 2016 but from the 2012 Protest. However, the video is both old and fake. The news was updated the same day with the new Information.

Story link: https://www.vishvasnews.com/urdu/viral/fact-check-old-video-of-sikh-rally-viral-as-khalistan-support-protest-in-amritsar/