Students from the UP College of Mass Communication competed in the 2021 Google News Initiative fact-checking competition held on Saturday, Sept. 25.
Patricia Mae Dacanay, Ann Beatrice Luna and John Mark Garcia from the Department of Broadcast Communication comprised the lone team representing UP Diliman in the international competition. The third-year Broadcast Media Arts and Studies students playfully named their team “Fact Ganern” after the famous Filipino catchphrase “Pak Ganern.”
Earlier this year, the team also participated in a similar fact-checking battle hosted by Google where they got a perfect score.
Patricia Dacanay, Bea Luna, and John Mark Garcia competed in the Google News Initiative fact-checking competition.
The live verification competition was part of Google’s University Verification Workshops campaign which intends to raise awareness on media literacy and fight against misinformation among tertiary students in universities across the Asia-Pacific Region. The competition was held in 10 other languages including Bahasa Indonesia, Bengali, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, and Urdu.
RELATED: Watch our video feature with the Pak Ganern team here.
The competition was composed of three rounds of 15-minute puzzles, from which the team correctly solved one. These challenges included exercises on reverse image search, source analysis, and geolocation.
The top three winning teams from today’s event will proceed to the finals at Google’s Trusted Media Summit to be held on Sept. 29.
While they fell short of reaching the top three at 998 points, team Fact Ganern was still happy to gain more knowledge from the experience especially now that they deem “investigatory work” more valuable than ever.
“I realized that trying new things can go a long way [at] lalo na ngayong magkakalayo kami, we were still able to pull off something like this,” Garcia said.
The team will be taking home certificates from digital media and information group DataLEADS as well as goodie bags from Google. DZUP