Verificado 2018 was a three-month collaborative journalism initiative to detect and counter false claims and disinformation related to Mexico's 2018 federal election.

[1][2] It involved over 90 partner organizations from across Mexico including local and national media outlets, universities, and civil society and advocacy groups.

[5] Verificado had more than 330,000 followers on Facebook and Twitter, and worked closely with WhatsApp, a social media app highly popular in Mexico.

[6] During the course of the election, Verificado 2018 published over 400 notes and 50 videos documenting false claims, suspect sites, and instances where fake news went viral.

They worked with Pop-Up Newsroom to design workflows for collaborative verification and content production that would be specific to the community partners and event involved, Mexico's general election.

[4] Between March and July 2018, they identified and fact-checked information that was reported to them, and collaboratively created and released educational and debunking content.

Verificado intentionally created strong visuals that were easy to read, searchable and shareable, and used social media techniques to address disinformation where it was happening.

[3][13] Check functioned as a central project database, providing team members with a collaborative workflow for curating, annotating and verifying content.

Senior editors assigned a final status such as True (Verdadero), False (Falso) or Misleading (Engañoso) to each claim.

[4] Verificado's ninety partners included television, national and local newspapers, radio, civil society and advocacy groups and academics from across Mexico.

[18] By working with academics and subject matter experts as well as traditional journalists, Verificado 2018 was able to bring insight and expertise to a wide range of issues and to respond quickly.

[18] In a culture where both news media and government were distrusted as partisan and corrupt, where there were high levels of election-related violence, and where disinformation was widely used to confuse and sway readers, Verificado 2018 was transparent about its organizational structure, its funding, and its reporting methodology.

[5][19] Verificado 2018 pointed out practices such as "declaracionitis", the publication of statements by public figures without analysis, considering that this way of proceeding implies forgetting a basic element in journalism: corroborating the information that is published.Verificado 2018 collaborated closely with WhatsApp, a highly popular private messaging app in Mexico that is often used by family members.

[20] A fact-checking note from the first presidential debate, which verified figures given by Ricardo Anaya, went viral with the hashtag #mientocomoAnaya.

[20] For the third debate, teams of roughly 20 people each were formed to address claims in three areas: education and science; economic development and poverty; and health, sustainability and climate change.

During the course of the election, they produced over 400 notes, 100 visuals, and 50 videos, tracking instances where fake news went viral and documenting false claims and suspect sites.

[7]: 25 Among the instances of disinformation that Verificado corrected were a false report of mass resignations of polling station workers in Mexico State, faked invoices purporting to be payments to a Mexican pop star, and out-of-context editing of a video suggesting that Ricardo Anaya had accepted defeat in the election.