YouCred: An Online Tool Co-Designed with Fact-Checkers for Misinformation Discovery on YouTube

Monitoring online platforms, one of the most challenging aspects of the fact-checking process, remains predominantly manual. Crafting search queries to surface potentially dubious online content is based on guesswork, demanding significant time and effort from fact-checkers. While monitoring tools exist for platforms like Facebook and X, a void exists for video platforms like YouTube. In this paper, we present YouCred, a system developed through a two-year partnership with Pesacheck, Africa’s largest indigenous fact-checking organization. YouCred supports misinformation discovery by generating search queries for topics of interest to fact-checkers and offers an interface for flagging and annotating videos containing potentially misinformative claims. It addresses the real-world needs of fact-checkers and harnesses their unique assets, including indigenous knowledge, resources, and expertise. Through a nine-month field deployment, we examined how fact-checkers integrated YouCred into their workflows. We find that YouCred provided meaningful query suggestions, enabled more targeted video discovery, and increased the efficiency of their fact-checking workflow. We reflect on YouCred as a long-term, real-world case of collaborative system development and deployment—highlighting design implications, showing how sustained use revealed evolving needs, and underscoring the importance of continuous adaptation and maintainability in socio-technical systems.