# CheckFirst CheckFirst is a small Finnish software and research company that builds tools for tracking disinformation and publishes investigations with partners. It started in 2020, in the first months of the pandemic, to counter COVID-19 falsehoods. Its own site lists Guillaume Kuster as co-founder and Amaury Lesplingart as chief technology officer. Its two most consequential investigations both concern Russian operations aimed at the information infrastructure itself rather than at the public. ## Signature work - **[[Operation Overload]] (June 4, 2024, with [[Reset Tech]]):** CheckFirst named the operation after pooling material from more than 20 fact-checking organizations. It counted more than 800 targeted organizations, about 2,400 tweets, more than 200 emails to newsrooms, and more than 250 resulting fact-checks. Its CTO called it "Matryoshka on steroids." A 2025 follow-up with Reset Tech, reported by WIRED, found output had roughly tripled and shifted to AI-generated images. - **[[Pravda Network]] (March 2025, with the Atlantic Council's [[Digital Forensic Research Lab]]):** found 1,907 links to Pravda-network sites across 1,672 [[Wikipedia]] pages in 44 languages, plus Pravda citations in X Community Notes. That is evidence the network was seeding the sources AI systems rely on. No political attacks on CheckFirst have been found. ## See Also - [[Operation Overload]] - [[Pravda Network]] - [[Fact-Checking]] - [[Antibot4Navalny]] - [[Disinformation Hub]]