Political fact-checking in the Middle East: What news can be verified in the Arab world?
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study examines the news selection processes followed by fact-checking organizations in the Middle East, specifically Egypt, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates, and gatekeeping such organizations face while working under authoritarian rule. By reviewing fact-checked news posted on the Facebook pages of six Arabic language organizations: Da Begad, HereszTruth, Fatabyyano, Matsad2sh, MisbarFC, and Saheeh Masr, this study manually analyzes about 5,000 fact-checked news stories to understand the extent of political fact-checking performed on Arab presidents, heads of government, and rulers, along with the most verified news topics. Results show that organizations in the Middle East rarely fact-check Arab rulers or refute their claims, while their news selection process prioritizes human interest topics. The study suggests that Arab fact-checkers resort to self-censorship due to gatekeeping influences that impact the region’s media climate.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it