Face The Facts – In Conversation with the Founders of Fact-Checking App For German Politicians

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Today, Sunday 23rd February 2025, German citizens go to the polls to vote in an election that will indelibly point to the future of the European Union and confirm the rise of the far-right across Europe. In a polarising political landscape such as today’s, in which billionaires have increasing political power, wars in Ukraine and Gaza continue to divide, the US is becoming increasingly more hostile under Trump’s return, and misinformation is ripe, the future of democracy as we know it today stands at a pivotal turning point.

Victor Bellu, an alumnus of CODE University in Berlin, built the ‘Face The Facts’ app in 2019, alongside colleagues. Fast-forward five years later and the app has 50k + downloads.

As Bellu tells me, “You likely don’t have the best representation when you don’t even know your direct member of parliament.” The idea of the app is simple – scan the election posters of electoral candidate, and the app gives information about them, ranging from where they studied and what they are mandating for to their political positions, side expenses, and any extra-political activities they are engaging in.

Initial inspiration for the app lay behind Axel Voss, an EU politician who wanted to push for Article 13 in the EU’s Copyright Directive, an article that aimed to enforce copyright online and was branded as the ‘they want to prohibit memes’ law. “There was a lot of protest from YouTubers, creators, and online communities about how absolutely stupid that was. The funny thing about Axel Voss is that nobody knew him before. And suddenly, this politician that nobody had heard of had so much power. That made me dig deeper and quickly realise that I had no […] clue who actually sits in parliament for me.”

Face The Facts started as three people and then quickly grew. From the very beginning it decided to go open source, and using grants from Wikimedia, the German government and other programmes they were given the luxury to focus on the app.

Bellu reveals that there were challenges, too, before building the app. The team conducted user research, and they found that “everybody [they] interviewed always acted as if they had thoroughly informed themselves about a party before voting. 50 people told us with a straight face they’d read the party programme. Nobody does that.”

Additionally, Bellu points out that the team found that many people are “way less informed about how democratic processes work in Germany”, like Erststimme and Zweitstimme, the two tiers to the German federal electoral system. This meant that they faced the problem of “needing to take a lot of information and display it in a way that people would understand – but not get bored.”

Bellu points to Christian Lindner, former finance minister of the fragile SPD/FDP/Gruene Ampelkoalition, whose dismissal led to Olaf Scholz calling the current snap election. Bellu highlights how he “had so many side jobs that we had to switch the UX (user experience design) for him. You obviously have a lot of edge cases when aggregating data about politicians. So, not knowing about many edge cases, we designed our first version around the average politician. The design was beautiful. When we connected the data of Christian Lindner, the guy had so many side jobs it broke our design concept. That’s why you now have an endless scroll when it comes to the side jobs of politicians.”

Another problem the team faced was that “there is no API. We had to scramble the data together from different, nearly arcane websites and scrape a lot because there is no single point where you can easily get the data.” Currently, most of the data used comes directly from the parliament or Abgeordnetenwatch, an online forum where users can pose questions to candidates and see their parliamentary activities.

With regards to the response to the app, Bellu states that they have been “[going] viral every election since [their] existence. Last time, we nearly reached Duolingo in the App Store (in the June 2024 EU elections), and this time, we’re getting a lot of downloads because people know us and we’re getting featured in some newspapers. It’s cool that FaceTheFacts is starting to become a brand and that even members of parliament use it. We actually got an offer from a presidential candidate in the US to build something similar there. But we declined because we don’t feel that we, as Germans, should build that for another country.”

What’s next for Bellu and Face the Facts?

“In the future, we might extend our aggregation towards normal parliaments, even on a city level, and then create some news stream together with AI. A huge problem in politics right now is that nobody looks at what happens at a local level because it is hard to follow and not exciting.”

For now, “with [extremism] rising all over Europe and the shift in the US, […] we need the best politicians we can get – and [to] hold them politically accountable on a personal level. You can easily ‘hide’ behind your party since most people don’t know you.”

With Face The Facts, Bellu and his team are helping address this problem, one that is likely to continue to exist for the foreseeable future, through innovation, technology and AI, one step at a time.