Lisbon, June 20, 2025 (Lusa) - The Lusa news agency will launch a new fact-checking service on Sunday, called Lusa Verifica, which Editor-in-Chief Luísa Meireles justified as “a public service duty” and a contribution to clarifying public opinion.
"Misinformation now goes far beyond journalism and requires more than the principle of contradiction, a principle that Lusa follows," Luísa Meireles explained.
Journalistic work produced the new service, and it employs techniques and tools that “allow the detection of false and decontextualised information and images, disseminated by increasingly sophisticated technologies that reach everyone,” she added.
“At this point, it is a public service duty to contribute to this clarification, which the information department fully assumes,” Meireles said.
The chair of the agency's board of directors, Joaquim Carreira, said that combating disinformation “is essential for social stability and the health of democratic institutions.”
Therefore, “more than ever, the role of Lusa, whose roots are based on values of trust and credibility, is essential to promote accurate information and counter disinformation,” he said.
"By ensuring and improving the accuracy and transparency of information," the agency "strengthens public trust and contributes to a democratic debate based on facts, directly benefiting democratic institutions and the quality of civic participation and contributing to greater inclusion in society," he added.
The agency will call the service Lusa Verifica and will adopt the classification “True”, “False” or “True, but...”, for cases of decontextualisation, applying to the verification of facts for statements or allegations made by national and international officials.
Lusa joins other news agencies that offer this type of service and will begin its certification on the European fact-checking platform (EFSCN, European Fact-Checking Standards Network) https://efcsn.com/ and the international platform - IFCN- International Fact-Checking Network https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/.
Lusa already has a page dedicated to current affairs on disinformation - https://combatefakenews.lusa.pt/ - and has been participating since 2024 in an ISCTE MediaLab project to monitor disinformation during the election campaign.
The agency also belongs to Iberifier, an Iberian project that combats disinformation, which includes more than twenty research centres and universities, the two news agencies in Portugal and Spain (Lusa and EFE), and fact-checkers.
NS/ADB // ADB.
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