The Fact from Fiction Programme

Check before you believe, and before you share

checking information, seeing through disinformation

This programme holds what the association publishes about information: how it is made, how it travels, and the moment we decide to believe it. It asks nobody to become a journalist. It installs a handful of moves that take seconds and happen before the share rather than after: who is speaking, where this sentence comes from, when it dates from, what is missing. Those moves are learned on concrete cases, because an abstract rule is forgotten and a case you have worked through stays.

Why this field matters

A false sentence travels just as well as a true one

Nothing about the way information reaches us signals that it has been checked. A headline is written to be opened, not to be accurate. A photograph proves that a scene existed, never that it happened where we are told it did. A figure cut off from the whole it came from tells us close to nothing. Nobody sorted any of it before us: the sorting falls to us, and it happens in seconds.

That is exactly where educational work earns its place, and not only the case-by-case correction. Correcting one false story settles one case; recognizing the device that holds it up settles a whole family of them. The next fabrication will use the same spring with different faces: urgency, outrage, borrowed authority, the one accurate detail that covers a false whole.

None of these moves calls for technical skill. They call for practice, because they run against a slope: we believe more readily what confirms what we already thought, and we share more readily what makes us angry. Knowing that is not enough. Practising is.

The devices

Three springs that always come back

The context removed

The image is authentic, the quote exact, the video real. What has gone missing is the date, the place, the sentence before. Nothing was faked: cutting was enough.

Borrowed authority

A title, a white coat, a logo, a line saying researchers have shown, with no name and no journal. The shape of the evidence is there; the evidence is not. The exact name, meanwhile, is one search away.

The figure with no whole

A raw number always impresses. Set against the total it came from, or against the same measure elsewhere, it sometimes turns ordinary, and sometimes turns out to mean the opposite of what was drawn from it.

The resource, in counted figures

750training cases published

10verification habits

7complete languages

10case categories, across 3 levels

Figures recounted at every release from the resource’s public data: see the method

What is online

The programme holds one resource online. Here is its full sheet: what it gets you doing, what it contains, and where to start, on your own or in front of a group.

Avant d’y croire

Person sitting on a bench, face hidden behind the wide-open newspaper they are reading

Learn to check a piece of information before believing or sharing it.

Avant d’y croire (French for “Before believing it”) explains 10 verification habits in plain language, with 750 interactive training cases sorted into 10 categories and 3 difficulty levels: misleading headlines, images torn from their context, fake experts, distorted figures. The cases are realistic and entirely fictional: you learn the mechanisms without spreading real misinformation. Everything works without an account, on a phone, and stays available offline after the first visit.

The training runs entirely in the browser: you read a case, take a stand, and the correction walks back through the clues one by one. The case library stays readable even without JavaScript, a workshop booklet prints for working without a screen, and the corpus data downloads freely.

750training cases

7languages

10verification habits

533pages online

Free, no account, no ads
7 languages: French, English, Spanish, Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Mandarin
A full accessibility panel (text size, contrast, audio reading)
A printable workshop booklet for teachers and activity leaders
Data downloadable as JSON, under a CC BY 4.0 license

The habits, as they appear on the site

“Who is speaking? What’s the source? What’s the date? Too good to be true? What if I’m the one who’s wrong?”

Five of the habits from Avant d’y croire

These are questions, not verdicts. They never say that a piece of information is false: they say whether there is enough there to believe it. The last one is the hardest and the most useful, because it applies just as much, and above all, to whatever happens to suit us.

Who it is for

One resource, three ways to use it

General public: On your own, with no account and no sign-up: you read a case, you take a stand, and the correction walks back through the clues one by one. Twenty minutes are enough to leave with two or three solid habits.
Families and carers: Enough to hold a conversation rather than give a lecture: a case opens for two, gets discussed, and gets settled together. That works better than being right on someone else’s behalf.
Teachers and activity leaders: Projected with a show of hands, worked through independently, or printed as a booklet: no account to create, no student data to hand over, and the open license allows adapting to the level of the group.

The shape

What this programme publishes, and how

The field changes from one programme to the next; the shape does not. Everything the association puts online follows the same construction rules, and they can be checked against what is already published.

The invariants

Free, no account, no ads: the resource opens and works, that’s it.
No data collected: no cookie, no tracker, no request to a third-party server.
Content under a CC BY 4.0 license: reuse, adapt, translate, republish, with one attribution line.
Open data as JSON, downloadable, so anyone can recount every figure stated.
Readable without JavaScript and printable, for working on paper or offline.

These five lines are not an intention: they can be verified page by page on this programme’s resource, with the network inspector open.

Keep going

The catalogue shows the 7 programmes side by side, and what sits on each one. This programme’s resource opens straight away, with nothing to install.

`Tab`	Move from link to link
`Enter`	Open the link, or expand and collapse a question
`?`	Open this help
`Esc`	Close the panel or this help