With millions of results generated for each question on search engines, it’s easy for fake news to slip through and for people to be manipulated. To sort fact from fiction before the 2017 presidential election in France, Libération, one of the most recognized newspapers in the country, decided to replace the quantity and speed of search engines, by the quality and rigor of its journalists. It’s a new kind of search engine, not powered by algorithms coming from Silicon Valley, but by humans.
Before the vote, French people could ask questions on checknews.fr and journalists from Libération investigated their queries before coming back to them a few hours later with checked answers. A simple idea to give voters what they really needed: real facts. This made checknews.fr the slowest search engine on earth. But also the most reliable.
During the campaign, #CheckNews became the most trending term on French social media to signal lies and approximations. After the campaign, Libération decided to turn this campaign into a permanent tool against fake news.
J. Walter Thompson Paris created “the slowest search engine on Earth” for Libération, as chronicled in this case study film.
