In the age of fake news, could fact-verification website Verrit be the answer? At least one major political figure thinks so.
Former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton tweeted her support for the website on Sunday, saying she’d signed up for the site and asking her supporters to do the same.
I’m excited to sign up for @Verrit, a media platform for the 65.8 million! Will you join me and sign up too? https://t.co/bOLSMyk6bG
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) September 3, 2017
What is Verrit? According to the website’s about page, the site “collects and contextualizes noteworthy facts, stats, and quotes for politically engaged citizens,” noting each piece of content as “a verified item of information marked with a seven-digit identification code.” In short, it’s like an authentication site for news and quotes. On the site’s homepage, some excerpted quoted are included from political figures ranging from Clinton herself and Michelle Obama to America’s very first commander in chief, George Washington. As an example, the latter quote from Washington includes a “source” notation, citing where it came from, along with Verrit’s authentication seal.
Many on social media, though, are questioning the site’s—and Clinton’s—intentions. The site’s motto is “Media for the 65.8 million,” which refers to Clinton’s popular vote count in the 2016 election, which roundly beat that of her opponent Donald Trump.
Business Insider caught up with the site’s founder and CEO Peter Daou, who told them: “We’re in a time now where you just no longer trust anything that you’re reading. Facts are now in question. Reality is now in question. So we want to do something where we rigorously vet these facts and we actually stand by our research and put an authentication code on every fact that we put up.”
Daou, who advised Clinton during her 2008 presidential run, told Business Insider that there was an even greater need for fact-verification, with President Trump in office. “When you lose a shared reality, where the definition of a fact is in question,” Daou told the publication, “there’s no longer the possibility of civil dialogue anymore….If the person you’re arguing with says, ‘I’m not going to concede that a fact is even a fact,’ you’ve got nothing left.”
As Daou recently tweeted, the site gained 35,000 new followers following Clinton’s tweet. He’s also been actively defending the site against “haters” via Twitter.
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