Four years ago, Wisconsin Watch took a leap of faith. We published our first Fact Brief in partnership with Gigafact, a tiny experiment meant to do something deceptively simple: answer suspicious claims with a clear yes or no. We called it the “fight for facts,” and at the time, none of us knew how much that fight would come to define our newsroom. Since then, we have published nearly seven hundred short, no-nonsense responses to claims we spotted floating around the infosphere—some surprising, some dubious, some simply too strange to ignore. The mission was never to win an argument or score points. It was to give people something solid to hold onto in a digital world where everything seems to shift beneath our feet. Misinformation isn’t just an abstract problem; it’s the thing that convinces a neighbor to skip a vaccine, or a voter to show up at the wrong polling place, or a family to pass along a hoax that sows distrust in their community. We wanted to be part of the solution, one Fact Brief at a time. And over the last four years, that commitment has grown into something far larger than a weekly checklist. It has become a genuine effort to model what honest, transparent journalism looks like in an age of confusion—and to invite the people we serve to join us in the work.
For most of those four years, however, the hunting was mostly on us. Our reporters would scan social media, monitor campaign ads, and follow the trail of outlandish headlines, looking for the claims most likely to mislead. It was a good system, but it had a blind spot. We couldn’t see everything. Misinformation often spreads fastest in private groups, neighborhood chats, and mailboxes—places where our reporting team doesn’t always have a seat at the table. At the same time, we realized that the people who read our work, and the people who live in Wisconsin, were seeing things we never would. They were the ones receiving forwarded messages from relatives, spotting suspicious fliers on their doorsteps, and overhearing rumors at the coffee shop. They were the early warning system we didn’t know we needed. That’s why we’re so excited about what comes next. This election season, Wisconsin Watch is trying something new, and we need your help to make it work. We’ve partnered with the Center for Media Engagement, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization at The University of Texas at Austin, to test a crowdsourcing tool that invites the public to flag misinformation directly to our fact-checking team. It’s a way of opening the door wider, of saying that the fight for facts doesn’t belong to journalists alone—it belongs to everyone who cares about having an informed community.
The tool is called Truth Sleuth, and it does exactly what its name suggests: it turns everyday readers into investigators. Instead of just hoping someone spots a false claim, Truth Sleuth gives you a simple way to pass it along to us. When you submit a report, it lands on a dashboard that our fact-checking team can review, investigate, and respond to. We’re especially focused this election season on false claims that could genuinely disrupt the democratic process—things like incorrect polling locations, wrong election dates, or misleading information about voter registration and mail-in ballots. These aren’t the kind of claims that just make you roll your eyes. They’re the kind that can cause real harm by keeping someone from casting a vote or convincing them their ballot won’t count. We want to catch those before they spread, and we want to catch them with your help. The dashboard allows us to organize incoming tips, identify patterns, and prioritize the claims most likely to cause confusion. It also turns our fact-checking process into a two-way conversation. You’re not just sending us a tip; you’re telling us what you’re hearing, what your community is worried about, and where the misinformation is actually hitting home. That kind of local knowledge is invaluable, especially during a heated election cycle when rumors can travel faster than facts.
So how do you get involved? It’s easier than you might think. Start by heading to the Truth Sleuth website and creating a free account. The whole process takes just a couple of minutes, and you don’t need any special skills or technical know-how. Once you’re logged in, click the “Report” button. You’ll be asked which agency you’d like to report to, and that’s where you choose Wisconsin Watch. From there, the tool walks you through a set of step-by-step instructions that help you categorize your submission and share the information. Maybe you saw something on Facebook, a suspicious meme in a group chat, or a text from an unknown number. Maybe you recorded a robocall or clipped a screenshot of a tweet. Whatever it is, you can describe what you saw, paste a link, or upload a photo. If you’re not sure whether it qualifies as misinformation, send it anyway. Better to have us look into something that turns out to be harmless than to hold onto a warning that could have helped dozens of voters. Once you hit submit, the report is on its way to us. We’ll receive it, add it to our dashboard, and begin the work of figuring out what’s true and what’s not. It’s a partnership built on trust: you trust us to take your report seriously, and we trust you to keep your eyes open.
Now, what kind of information should you submit? In general, the rule is simple: if it seems questionable, send it our way. Our Fact Briefs have always been based on claims we find “surprising or dubious,” and our standards haven’t changed. Not every claim we check turns out to be false—sometimes a rumor is just a misunderstood truth, and that’s okay too. We’re not in the business of shaming anyone. We’re in the business of providing clarity. You can submit a link to the original source, whether that’s a website, a social media post, or a news article. You can also submit a detailed description if the claim came to you verbally, like a conversation at work or a comment made at a town hall meeting. And please, feel free to submit a photo. This is especially useful in October, when campaign fliers start stuffing mailboxes across Wisconsin. Those fliers are often designed to look official, and they can be full of misleading information about candidates, ballot measures, or voting procedures. Snap a picture and send it to us. We’ll take it from there. Nothing is too insignificant. If you have doubts about something, chances are other people do too, and that’s exactly what makes it worth investigating. The smallest piece of misinformation can have the biggest impact when it lands at the wrong moment, and you never know which tip will turn into the next Fact Brief that stops a lie in its tracks.
At its heart, this new chapter is about a simple but powerful idea: journalism doesn’t have to be a one-way broadcast. It can be a shared effort, a collaboration between a newsroom and the community it serves. Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit, nonpartisan newsroom, which means our only allegiance is to accuracy and fairness. We’re not trying to drive clicks or inflame outrage. We’re trying to give Wisconsinites the information they need to make decisions for themselves, their families, and their communities. That’s why we’re inviting you to become a Truth Sleuth, not just for this election season but as part of an ongoing movement to push back against misinformation wherever it lives. We know we can’t stop every lie on our own, but together, we can build a network of careful, curious people who refuse to accept nonsense at face value. So check out the Truth Sleuth website, create your account, and start reporting what you see. Subscribe to our newsletters for original stories and our Friday news roundup, and feel free to republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license. The fight for facts isn’t going to end anytime soon, but with your help, we can make sure the facts have a fighting chance.