For more information: Daniel Soto Morfn daniel.soto@nyu.

edu
What is Mxico Verica?
Mxico Verica is a collaborative platform to fact-check
political statements and help correct falsehoods in Mexican
politics.
Mxico Verica intends to complement the job of journalists
and media professionals by using the expertise and
knowledge of citizens.
As a crowdsourcing platform, Mxico Verica encourages
people to contribute and provide information to assess the
veracity of political statements providing data, reports,
analysis, and government disclosures (result of ofcial
information requests: open data).
As a result, this project promotes citizens engagement in
democracy, government accountability, and transparency. It
could potentially increase the knowledge of voters about
politicians positions, too.
Why this project?
Less than 40 percent of Mexicans trust the Federal
Government, State and Municipal governments and
communication media, while less than 30 percent trust in
Representatives and Political parties (IFE 2014).
In Mexico, most political coverage is based on ofcial press
releases. Information provided by the government tends to be
assumed as intrinsically true.
Mexican journalism is characterized by its declaracionitis:
the practice of privileging the reporting of declarations. A
study of the organization Article 19 showed that only 27.63
percent of the headlines in newspapers were factual.
More than 60 fact-checking projects have emerged
throughout the world. Mxico Verica joins this trend that aims
to increase the political knowledge of citizens.
How it works?
! Mxico Vericas team identies
political statements and posts them
on its website, along with specic
questions that should be answered to
decide if the statement is true or false.
! Self-selected registered users
contribute by answering the questions
with specic data found on o#cial
documents, statistics, pdfs, reports,
spreadsheets, etc.
! Based on the utility and relevance of
these answers, users vote positively or
negatively for these answers. This
allows users to increase their
reputation score and unlock new
tools.
! Mxico Verica uses the top three
rated collaborations to make the nal
ruling regarding the veracity of the
statement. The information is used to
create an index of trust of candidates,
politicians, and news media.
What we need?
! Mxico Verica needs an initial grant
of $47,000 USD to fund the
development and testing of the
project. The money will cover:
! Development of the website,
acquisition of domain, hosting of the
website
! Initial testing of the process and
independent audit report.
! Adjustments after testing the product
and the process.
! Salary of two full time sta$ plus one
programmer during 6 months of
development and testing.
MXICO VERIFICA
A FACT-CHECKING CITIZEN PLATFORM