• Priority Area Supporting Research into Media, Disinformation and Information Literacy Across Europe
• Year 2023, 2024, 2025
• Country Italy
• Project Status Ongoing

FacTS aims to enhance the public understanding of what drives disinformation in politics, inform the academic and public debate on how to effectively improve transparent information ecosystems, and ultimately foster politicians’ accountability – one of the main pillars on which representative democracy stands. 

Specifically, the project will provide two key contributions:

• The development of a new measure of transparency. To this end, we will create an index of verifiability (fact-checkability) of the public statements of Italian national legislators at the daily level over the period 1993-2022, the so-called “Second Italian Republic”. The analysis will employ a number of supervised learning models from machine learning theory to classify all politicians’ statements as verifiable or not.
• An empirical analysis of the potential causes of disinformation in politics, achieved through state-of-the-art econometric techniques. This goal will involve estimating the causal effects on the verifiability index of exogenous shocks both on the supply side of disinformation due to the electoral and career incentives of politicians and on the demand side of disinformation, such as shocks on the voters’ cost of acquiring information or engagement on social media platforms. The empirical analysis will be complemented and guided by a theoretical framework. 

FacTS will extend its impact beyond its boundaries and lifetime. Our methodology will be readily applicable to any country with an operational independent fact-checking company. We expect FacTS to catalyze a network of researchers engaged in constructing and analyzing verifiability indexes across different countries and over time.