Check First aspires to make the internet a fairer and better place. We pioneered algorithm analysis and deploy expert skills to probe the digital space and its actors.

We’re defining new platform auditing benchmarks and are committed to demystifying internet ecosystems and combating disinformation and foreign influence.

Our projects Our publications
We are Check First

About us

Check First is a leading Finnish software and methodologies company, spearheading adversarial research techniques. We believe that everyone should be able to understand how and why content is presented to them. We advocate for online clarity and accountability, building solutions to attain this goal. Partnering with leading institutions, regulators, NGOs and educators, we aim at curbing the spread of disinformation and foreign influence manipulations.

Our story

Our Services

Training

We offer state of the art training in digital media transformation, content creation, audience targeting for journalism, OSINT techniques and of course, our own tools. Training is provided by a team of experts with 20+ years of experience in the media field.

Open Source Investigation

Need help making sense of the sea of information available online? If it's accessible publicly, we can help. Our team of experts can share their knowledge about the intricacies of the web and find gold mines of information spread out in every corner of the internet. If it exists, we'll find it and help you make sense of it.

Development

Check First is all about finding the best tool for the job. With an experience of 20+ years in software development, our team members will help you organise your data, foster collaboration among your team and help you showcase it to the public or your target stakeholders.

Research

Data is cool. Making sense of it is better. Our strength is the complementarity of our team, coming from both the tech and the media world. Our research is aimed at understanding an issue, following a lead and performing investigations to stress what is relevant.

Monitoring

Accountability is a strong value of our company, and we wish everybody would be accountable. Check First has taken part in successful projects monitoring big platforms to provide researchers with data and make sure stakeholders are delivering what they promised.

Methodologies

Losing time is one of the most frustrating sides of collaboration. We aim at streamlining partnerships and internal work. Having led or participated in large-scale and international operations, Check First can share what we've learned to approach problems efficiently and iteratively enhance our partners' methodologies.

Explore our resources

Check First produces a variety of content, from articles to webinars and training. Below is a repository of our public resources, created during the execution of our various projects.

All resources
Mozilla commissions CheckFirst to conduct a stress test of Ad Repositories
Mozilla commissions CheckFirst to conduct a stress test of Ad Repositories
We’re proud to publish today together with the Mozilla Foundation the first comprehensive report on the state of ad libraries which have [...]
CheckFirst and Faktabaari present a new study showing Finnish far-right videos highly recommended by YouTube during the presidential race
CheckFirst and Faktabaari present a new study showing Finnish far-right videos highly recommended by YouTube during the presidential race
CheckFirst and Faktabaari present their first report on the CrossOver Finland project—a significant milestone. [...]

Check First is proud to be trusted by

Mozilla Tech Fund
European Comission
EU Disinfo Lab
France TV
ISD
Organisation Internationalle de la Francophonie
Reset.tech
Sodertorn University