{"id":48009,"date":"2026-07-20T10:32:54","date_gmt":"2026-07-20T08:32:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/?p=48009"},"modified":"2026-07-20T10:41:12","modified_gmt":"2026-07-20T08:41:12","slug":"factoscope-the-francophone-hub-for-media-verification-and-media-literacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/subject\/lifelong-learning\/factoscope-the-francophone-hub-for-media-verification-and-media-literacy\/","title":{"rendered":"Factoscope: The Francophone Hub for Media Verification and Media Literacy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

by Mariana Gr\u00e9pinet,<\/strong> University of Tours, France ; editor-in-chief of the Factoscope.fr platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four new media outlets and organisations have joined Factoscope.fr<\/a> in the space of two months, bringing this francophone media-verification and media-literacy portal’s total number of partners to 38, spread across 16 countries. Among the latest arrivals: Influencemag.ci<\/a>, an independent digital outlet based in C\u00f4te d’Ivoire founded by journalist Marina Kouakou, which added fact-checking to its output as disinformation rose; and SciencesCheck<\/a>, a scientific-verification initiative based in Bamako, Mali, combining fact-checking, scientific expertise and digital pedagogy. The pace of new memberships speaks to the vitality of a project that has become, within a few years, a reference point for the whole French-speaking world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now led by the \u00c9cole publique de journalisme de Tours<\/a> (EPJT, Tours’ public journalism school) under the direction of Laurent Bigot \u2013 the school’s director of publication and Factoscope’s founder \u2013 together with the NGO Nothing2Hide<\/a>, with support from CFI \u2013 D\u00e9veloppement m\u00e9dias<\/a> (the French media development agency, backed by the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs), the project is anything but a one-off experiment. It was born in 2017, during the French presidential campaign, when web-press students at EPJT set out to aggregate political fact-checks already produced by Lib\u00e9ration, Le Monde, Les Surligneurs<\/a>, Arte and La 5, while carrying out their own verifications. A second version, Factoscope 2017-2022, then tracked the statements of French political figures throughout the following five-year presidential term. Since 2023, a third version \u2013 intended as the project’s final iteration \u2013 has changed both in nature and in scale: Factoscope.fr has become a permanent portal, entirely in French, covering the whole chain of the fight against disinformation across the French-speaking world : verification articles, investigative tools, teaching resources and a scholarly resource base.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A growing community of fact-checkers<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The site’s core remains its Articles section, which brings together fact-checking output from these 38 media and partner organisations (including TV5Monde), based in Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, the Central African Republic, Congo-Brazzaville, C\u00f4te d’Ivoire, France, Guinea, Mali, Mauritania, DR Congo, Romania, Senegal and Tunisia. Journalists from these contributing media outlets have been trained in international fact-checking standards, in particular through the D\u00e9sinfox Afrique project run by CFI, or through other field training programmes run by the \u00c9cole publique de journalisme de Tours (EPJT) and Nothing2Hide with embassies, French cultural institutes, partner journalism schools and other organisations (foundations, NGOs, and the like). Their content gains greater visibility here, along with secure hosting; particularly valuable when it is produced in sensitive contexts. It is supplemented by original productions from journalists in training at EPJT.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This community is also growing through the Francophone Verification Awards (Prix de v\u00e9rification francophones), whose second edition launched on 2 April 2026, International Fact-Checking Day (entries extended to 31 August). Four prizes of \u20ac1,000 each reward verifying media outlets (political statements, debunking, audiovisual recontextualisation, disinformation targeting women), joined in 2026 by two new prizes open to civil-society and academic initiatives. The jury brings together the Th\u00e9ophraste network of francophone journalism schools, Nothing2Hide, EPJT, CFI and the Agence universitaire de la francophonie (AUF), the worldwide francophone university network.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shared OSINT tools<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The Tools section, curated by Nothing2Hide, lists resources organised by use: website analysis, databases, setting up secure investigation accounts, data visualisation, Chromium and Firefox extensions, image and video verification, specialised search engines, setting up an investigation workstation, and researching social media accounts and profiles. Tutorials help users get to grips with these tools, essential to the daily work of investigative reporters and fact-checkers alike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Media literacy, from short workshops to in-depth training<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

The Media and Information Literacy (MIL) strand brings together about thirty teaching sheets produced by Nothing2Hide, filterable by audience (children, teenagers, adults, seniors) and by length, from 5 minutes to 3 hours. Workshops on offer include \u201cInfluencers vs journalists: understanding their roles\u201d, \u201cScroll, like, comment: how platforms capture your attention\u201d, \u201cArtificial intelligence: I’m hallucinating!\u201d, \u201cSeeing what we want to see: unpacking confirmation bias\u201d, and the \u201cCitizen investigation workshop\u201d, which introduces citizens and journalists together to OSINT techniques through a real investigative topic. TV5Monde adds to this collection with a media-literacy resource pack designed for French-as-a-foreign-language learners, adaptable for native francophone audiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Tools and Media Literacy sections both draw on content (directories and links to online resources, teaching sheets) produced by the NGO Nothing2Hide, as well as on productions from the media-literacy workshops of the D\u00e9tours project, led by EPJT with support from the DRAC Centre \u2013 Val de Loire, the regional cultural affairs authority.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Faussoventaire, a scholarly memory of disinformation<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Another distinctive feature of the project: the Faussoventaire (a play on \u201cinventaire\u201d, inventory, and \u201cfaux\u201d, fake) \u2013 a database of more than seven hundred resources on the issue of disinformation, built and maintained by the PRIM research team (Pratiques et ressources de l’information et des m\u00e9diations, University of Tours) as part of the Vijie project, funded by France’s National Research Agency. Academic sources, official reports, dictionaries, journalistic investigations and works of fiction are indexed by theme \u2013 fake news, conspiracy theories, rumours, propaganda, post-truth \u2013 and open to outside contributions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A participatory portal, open to new contributors<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Factoscope.fr sees itself as both a resource portal and a participatory outlet, open to any proposal for editorial contribution to the fight against disinformation. That is the logic behind the partnership signed in April 2025 with the worldwide francophone channel TV5MONDE, intended to amplify the visibility of the verification work carried out by contributing media and of Factoscope.fr’s educational content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Mariana Gr\u00e9pinet <\/strong>teaches at two journalism schools : the EPJT, at the University of Tours and the IPJ Dauphine-PSL in Paris. She has just completed a doctoral thesis on French journalists’ media literacy practices, to be defended in October. A freelance senior reporter after nineteen years at Paris Match magazine, she is also editor-in-chief of the Factoscope.fr platform.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Mariana Gr\u00e9pinet, University of Tours, France ; editor-in-chief of the Factoscope.fr platform. Four new media outlets and organisations have joined Factoscope.fr in the space of two months, bringing this francophone media-verification and media-literacy portal’s total number of partners to 38, spread across 16 countries. Among the latest arrivals: Influencemag.ci, an independent digital outlet based in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":48014,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,276,272],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48009","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-articles","category-lifelong-learning","category-media-literacy"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/files\/2026\/07\/Copy-of-now-available-in-8-languages-2.png","author_info":{"display_name":"Chlo\u00eb P\u00e9t\u00e9","author_link":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/author\/chloe-pete\/"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48009","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48009"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48009\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48073,"href":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48009\/revisions\/48073"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48009"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48009"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/media-and-learning.eu\/api-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48009"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}