Verification Institutions should be increased – Dilara Eldaş

Doğruluk Payı (“Share of Truth” may be we can say) is a website that aims to verify the political actors speech which place on media. According to explanations and speech that done by political figures very frequently, the manipulation or misunderstanding of the statements can be really a huge problem. In the favour of dogrulukpayi.com  and its social media accounts, people can easliy reach if a political member of a party in parliament did a completely right speech or not.

Doğruluk Payi, usually measure the statements which are found a place on media, social media and newspapers. People normally get reaction to those statements but sometimes when they are not completely true or totally wrong it can caused a big discussions among people too.

General Coordinator of Doğruluk Payı, Batuhan Ersun explains this situation as a problem; “Newspapers and news channels are not enough to verify those information that comes from political actors; media sometimes claim that they have no time to verify them and sometimes they probably ignore their truth. So as Doğruluk Payi we aimed to be a trustful platfrom for verification of those statements.”

Criterias they use:

While Doğruluk Payi pick which statements share of truth to inspect, they have some criterias:

-First of all, the statement must said by a political leader, a political actor, etc.

-Secondly, the statement should be measurable. It should be about numbers, years, statistics; which are already saved by official institutions and shared related informations.

-Thirdly, if the statement really caused misunderstanding or manipulation and if its truth can be proved, they investigate its truth.

Scores they give:

After this process Doğruluk Payi gives a score to statement that they investigate its truth.

For this score they have 5 preferences. Another words, according to Doğruluk Payı, a measurable political statement can be either “True, No share of Truth, Near True, Far from True, or Fifty-fifty.”

Batuhan Ersun explains it’s reason: We determine 5 kinds of score because sometimes in a political statement has also a true and wrong way, after our editors controls the each sentence of a statement they decide what its score is.

When we measure a political statement it also means that we critisize a politican man – women. In order to not to say that “he/she is lying -cause it would sometimes be an insult- if it is untrue we prefer to say it has No share of Truth.

Sources they use:

Doğruluk Payı work as a news center. After they choose what they are going to inspect according to their criterias, they check its truth from any trustful, official resources that every journalist also use. They are open data on Internet. Sometimes they have to look more that one resource to only verify just on sentence. Türkiye İstatistik Kurumu, Başbakanlık BİMER, past official records, World official institutions data, etc. etc.

Is Doğruluk Payı useful enough?

I think it is pretty alright to be a balance power for the contraversial issues on politics. It is also a strong answer to the media companies who claims that they cannot verify the statements and pretending as if they are completely true.

My impression is as Batuhan Ersun says, those platforms like Doğruluk Payı or teyit.org should be increase and they decrease the manipulation of the mainstream media contents more and more!