Haley Created a Site to Fact-Check DeSantis. It Could Use More Context.

More than a dozen times during Wednesday night’s Republican presidential debate, Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, directed viewers to a website purporting to correct what she called Ron DeSantis’s “lies.”

But the Haley campaign’s website is itself a political project — not an exercise in objective fact-checking.

The site does point to independent fact-checking to help push back on claims twisting Ms. Haley’s positions on things like Gaza refugees and to clarify her comments about being motivated to run for office by a speech made by Hillary Clinton, despite their political differences.

But there are key differences between Ms. Haley’s effort and an independent fact-checking operation. The website, for example, doesn’t directly quote Mr. DeSantis or cite the specific comments being rebutted. It also deems a “lie” some statements that don’t actually contain checkable facts.

“Mr. DeSantis claims he will take on the big spenders in Washington,” the site says, calling his claim a lie because while in Congress he voted to increase the federal debt limit. Ms. Haley may well use that line of criticism in her campaign, but that alone doesn’t make Mr. DeSantis’s statements about his intent to rein in federal spending a “lie.”

“Ultimately it’s still campaign propaganda,” said Bill Adair, the creator of the website PolitiFact and a Duke University journalism professor. “It’s not fact-checking.”