We check the thing
before you forward it.
DisMis settles what is doing the rounds, built for the way a claim actually reaches you: a forward from an uncle at 6am, a rumour, one line out of a group chat. Paste it in. We go and look. You get a straight answer in the time it takes to read one message.
What DisMis actually does
You give us a claim in whatever shape you heard it: a headline, a rumour, one sentence from a group chat. We search the open web for it: reporting outlets, wire copy, official statements, public records, established fact-checking networks. We read what comes back, line it up against the claim, and call it.
Call it a verification layer over the internet. The web already holds the answer to most of what lands in your group chat. It just holds it across twelve tabs, four paywalls and a search page that puts the loudest version on top. We read those sources in parallel, against each other, and hand back the one thing you actually wanted: whether to hit forward.
Then we put the call in plain language, show you what we leaned on, and stamp it:
No lecture, no scroll of footnotes
Nobody forwards a 2,000-word explainer. So the answer is one card: the verdict, the reason in a sentence, the sources underneath it. Small enough to send straight back into the group the claim came from, which is the only place a correction ever actually lands.
Dis from disinformation. Mis from misinformation. Put them together and you get what we do with both of them: dismiss.
Disinformation is a lie somebody built on purpose. Misinformation is that lie after five forwards, when the person sending it fully believes it. Most of what reaches your phone is the second kind, which is exactly why blaming people for falling for it misses the point.
Why smart people fall for it
Being educated is no protection at all. A false forward doesn't beat your intelligence, it goes around it:
Nobody fact-checks their own mother. The message doesn't come from a stranger on the internet, it comes from family, and trust in the sender gets quietly transferred to the claim.
Fear, outrage, pride, disgust. A claim engineered to make you feel something gets forwarded before the part of your brain that asks questions has even come online.
Repetition feels like evidence. When the same thing turns up in three groups and one status, your head reads that as confirmation, even if it's one lie, copy-pasted.
The good ones aren't invented, they're bent. A real photo with the wrong year. A real quote with a clause cut out. Everything checks out except the part that matters.
And what it costs when nobody checks
This isn't about being wrong in an argument. Forwards move money, medicine and mobs:
- Somebody gets hurt. Kidnapping and cattle-theft rumours have gathered crowds and killed people who turned out to be strangers passing through. India has a long, documented record of it.
- Somebody stops taking their medicine. A voice note about a "banned" drug or a home cure that "doctors are hiding" travels further than any prescription, and the person who acts on it is usually the one who could least afford to.
- Somebody loses savings. A screenshot about a bank, a scheme or a deadline sets off a queue at the ATM, or a transfer to an account that closes by evening.
- Somebody's name is finished. An edited clip is enough to make a person a villain in their own town. The correction, if it ever comes, reaches a tenth of the people the accusation did.
- Everyone gets a bit more tired. The quieter damage: after enough of this, people stop believing anything at all, which is exactly what whoever started it wanted.
One person checking before they press forward breaks the chain at that link. That's the whole idea. It isn't heroic, it's just thirty seconds.
Why we're doing this
We got tired of being the person in the family group who has to explain, again, that the photo is from 2016.
Checking a claim was never hard, exactly. It was just slow, and boring, and you had to know where to look. So the honest answer for most people was to shrug and forward it. We built DisMis to remove that excuse: one box, one paste, one answer, free, no login, no thread of angry replies.
We are independent and small. No party, no publisher, no brand paying us to reach a conclusion. Nobody gets to choose what we check, and nobody gets to choose how it comes out. When we get something wrong we would rather hear it and fix it than defend it. Write to us and we will look again.
Read this too
We are a starting point, not a court. What we can and can't promise is spelled out plainly in our terms and privacy page. Worth two minutes before you rely on a verdict for anything that matters.
Independent claim-checking has no sugar daddy. That's the point, and the problem.
Every single check costs us real money: live searches, servers, the machine time to read what comes back. We keep it free because the people most flooded with forwards are the least likely to pay for the truth. Nobody funds us, so there is nobody to keep happy, but it also means the meter is running on our own pocket.
If any of this felt useful, help us keep the lights on. Fund us, invest, partner, volunteer, or just send the link to the group that needs it most.
Support us →Talk to us
Corrections, tip-offs, a claim we got wrong, press, partnerships, or a claim you want checked and can't get an answer on. One inbox, and a human reads it: dismisofficial@gmail.com