By Angie Drobnic Holan

Every year on April 2, fact-checkers celebrate International Fact-Checking Day. Usually it’s a time for celebration, fun, even for a little irreverence. This year, for example, the British actor Stephen Fry is giving fact-checkers a shout-out and asking people to think before they share.

But this year’s fact-checking day also marks a very serious moment for the fact-checking community. We are facing multiple challenges to our ability to do our journalism, and it’s not clear what the next few years will bring. As director of the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter, which connects 170 organizations around the world all adhering to high standards in fact-checking, I see a community under intense pressure. Not everyone loves fact-checking, and there are powerful political forces that would simply like it to go away.

This is indeed a crisis for fact-checkers, but it’s even worse for the general public. Disinformation hurts people. It has real-world consequences. Without fact-checking, more grandparents will fall victim to financial scams. Adults will refuse to vaccinate children against proven killers like measles. Teens will read faked reports of current events with no way to tell them apart from the real thing. 

Two heavy blows hit fact-checking in 2025. In January, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced his decision to end its third-party fact-checking in the United States. The program paid fact-checkers to help Meta identify and flag hoaxes and other false information on its platform; the program’s end means less money for fact-checkers and less distribution via one of the world’s largest social media companies. Right now, only U.S. fact-checkers will be affected, but it may end up being rolled out to the rest of the world in 2026. 

The other blow came from President Donald Trump’s administration, when billionaire Elon Musk pointed his Department of Government Efficiency at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The abrupt ending of USAID meant an immediate end to funding independent international journalism, which included support for fact-checkers in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. Some of these fact-checkers have suffered quietly, trying to find other ways to fund their work. Others have been the target of harassment and even government repression, as in Serbia, where government authorities raided their offices. 

Yet fact-checking is resilient. What began as a few quirky experiments in online journalism between 2007 and 2014 has blossomed into a mature array of fact-checking newsrooms around the world. They are sites like PolitiFact and Factcheck.org in the United States; Full Fact in the United Kingdom; Maldita and Newtral in Spain; Chequeado in Argentina; Pravda in Poland; Aos Fatos and Lupa in Brazil; and so many others in countries large and small. 

This ecosystem was in place and growing in 2016 when Meta announced it would start paying fact-checkers to help identify hoax content on Facebook. That jump started the growth of fact-checking. The public funding that Elon Musk is trashing was another factor in the growth of fact-checking; groups like USAID thought that funding fact-checking overseas would empower democracy and accountable government. I remember an international development officer telling me that fact-checking encouraged fact-based public debate on important public issues and therefore encouraged stable societies.  

That hopeful vision hasn’t played out, but it doesn’t mean that fact-checking isn’t needed. On the contrary, with lies on the march, fact-checking is more important than ever. Fact-checking’s effectiveness, in fact, may be why it is under such harsh attack in 2025. Fact-checking holds the line on reality for history’s sake. It builds evidence-based records that can withstand political pressures. Politicians who want to create their own realities are fighting hard against fact-checking, and they’re strong-arming tech companies and social media platforms into helping them.

But these social media platforms are also under pressure from their own users. The public expects social media platforms to provide a positive user experience, and that means that users don’t have to wade through feeds full of hoaxes, scams and conspiracy theories. And in fact, nearly two-thirds of American adults tell pollsters they support independent fact-checking journalists reviewing social media posts. 

Meta has promised to unveil a new system of content moderation on its platforms, imitating the “community notes” program that Twitter launched before it became X. But community notes aren’t a great way to counteract harmful disinformation. They rely on everyday users to sort out fact from fiction by attaching notes to content, so they tend to be slow to appear. They also require widespread agreement among users who often have raging political disagreements. 

I hope community notes evolve to include fact-checkers. Fact-checkers could speed the process and create more notes based on evidence and sourcing. A recent study showed that community notes users are already citing published fact-checking regularly. Meta and X’s commitments to community notes show that they know they can’t simply ignore the public’s desire for accurate content. 

Right now, social media’s turn away from fact-checking is being driven by political agendas and political pressure. Musk has poured millions of dollars into supporting Trump and his campaign. Zuckerberg’s comments and those of his lieutenants suggest his decision was expressly made to win the favor of the new administration. When directly asked whether Zuckerberg was responding to his threats, Trump himself said, “Probably.” 

Politicians have led the charge that fact-checking is “censorship,” but that self-serving argument is fundamentally a mischaracterization of what fact-checkers do. We’re more like nutrition labels for online content. Nobody thinks a nutrition label on a bag of potato chips or a gallon of milk is censorship. Similarly, fact-checking adds information to the public debate and public action.

Trump and his supporters want an information environment where lies can multiply and go viral without anyone contradicting them. That is the real infringement on freedom of speech. As Stephen Fry says in his video praising fact-checkers, “Fact-checkers aren’t the enemies of free speech, they are its guardians, ensuring the debate is grounded in reality rather than fantasy.”

Continue reading Angie Drobnic Holan’s article here. 


Financial pressures and harassment are among top concerns for fact-checkers worldwide, report finds

  (Credit: Chris Kozlowski)

For the State of the Fact-Checkers reporting, I turn to Maria Ramirez Uribe: 

Financial constraints, threats of harassment and shifting audience habits were among the top concerns for fact-checkers in 2024, the International Fact Checking Network’s State of the Fact-checkers Report found.

Ahead of International Fact-Checking Day, which is April 2, the network’s seventh annual report presented findings from a survey completed by fact-checkers around the world, from 141 organizations in 67 countries.

The International Fact-Checking Network presented its findings in a March 31 Zoom call with members from its more than 100 signatories.

Enock Nyariki, the network’s communications manager, highlighted the report’s key takeaways, while director Angie Drobnic Holan spoke with Ana Brakus, executive director of Faktograf, Croatia’s first and only fact-checking outlet, and Olivia Sohr, director of impact and new initiatives at Chequeado, Latin America’s first fact-checking organization.

Holan, Brakus and Sohr discussed the effects of Meta’s decision to end its U.S. fact-checking program, the opportunities and challenges of artificial intelligence technology and the importance of collaboration among fact-checkers.

Here are some highlights:

Fact-checking organizations are facing financial uncertainty.

Close to 90% of fact-checkers cited financial sustainability as the top challenge for their organizations.

Though the report focused on 2024, fact-checkers responded to the survey from Jan. 22 to Feb. 7, after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of the company’s fact-checking initiative in the U.S. in a Jan. 7 video.

When or whether the program will end internationally is unclear, creating financial uncertainty for fact-checkers around the world. About 60% of survey respondents said they participated in the Meta fact-checking program. And more than half said a third of their revenue came from the program.

Beyond the concerns about funding from tech companies, Sohr said, fact-checkers in Latin America have also seen the end of many journalism grants, “making the situation much more complicated than it was a year ago.”

Among the funds frozen by the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency are grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development for news organizations around the world.

Brakus had a message for the philanthropic community, specifically for donors who made a funding strategy before President Donald Trump’s election that “didn’t take into account the complete dismantlement of financial support for media organizations globally.”

“If your strategy did not include the world falling apart, you need to do it again,” Brakus said. But she added that, despite the financial losses, the precarious situation “is also creating a space for new faces, new people, new organizations and new ways of thinking to come in.”

Fact-checkers prioritize debunking political misinformation as audiences favor short videos

Seventy-two countries held elections in 2024, which was described as “the biggest election year in human history” by the United Nations. Fact-checkers said most of their work revolved around debunking misinformation about elections, social issues and public health.

Holan highlighted a shift in the misinformation landscape.

“We’re losing the distinction between political content and viral content,” she said. “I used to see those as very different kinds of misinformation phenomena, but now they’re much more similar.”

Nearly 60% of fact-checkers said they fact-checked both internet-based and political misinformation in roughly equal parts.

Politicians often repeat viral claims from social media while internet misinformers “pick up political messaging,” Holan said.

As for how audiences engage with fact-checkers’ work, short-form videos were the most effective format for reaching new audiences, according to 74% of fact-checkers. In addition to videos, survey respondents also found success with infographics and short fact-checks.

“Successful engagement requires changing very quickly to what the audience needs,” Nyariki said. “Giving them fast visuals and being mobile first.”

Artificial intelligence creates new opportunities but raises ethical concerns.

As artificial intelligence models continue to grow, fact-checking organizations are grappling with how to implement the technology’s capacities. About half of the survey respondents said their organizations use AI for preliminary research. But ethical concerns, high costs and lack of technical expertise are among fact-checkers’ main challenges when it comes to integrating AI into their newsrooms.

Chequeado, Sohr’s organization, is among the fact-checking groups pioneering the use of AI in the field. The group has used AI to “accelerate production times” by turning written articles into video scripts, transcribing audio and identifying checkable statements.

“Always with a lot of human supervision,” Sohr said.

Citing International Center for Journalists Knight fellow Nikita Roy’s keynote address at the International Fact-Checking Network’s 2024 GlobalFact 11 conference, Holan said, “AI is a language tool.” It’s best at synthesizing and paraphrasing information, “but it’s not a great research tool, or at least it’s not great at returning reliable results.”

Brakus advised fact-checkers to create codes of ethics for their organizations’ AI use. She also urged groups to think of AI beyond its technological capacities. She said people should account for the “human toll, the effects it has on our climate, and how quickly we can become dependent on this kind of rapid evolution of AI everywhere in our lives.”

Harassment remains a constant threat for fact-checkers worldwide.

Nearly 80% of fact-checkers said they faced threats or online abuse in 2024. Respondents cited threats to both individuals and their organizations as a whole.

Continue reading Maria Ramirez Uribe’s reporting here. 

Investigating disinformation narratives webinar announced by IFCN

For this item, I turn to my colleague Alanna Dvorak, IFCN’s international training manager:

The International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute, a global leader in journalistic excellence, is pleased to announce a free webinar April 23 on understanding and reporting on disinformation narratives. 

Taught by IFCN signatories Maldita, this 90-minute webinar will instruct participants in practical skills, including how to best monitor narrative ecosystems, identify key amplifiers and how to best communicate findings. 

“The work on narratives is fundamental for the understanding of disinformation; that’s probably why it’s often under attack,” said Clara Jiménez Cruz, co-founder and CEO of Maldita. “That’s why it is incredibly important to stress that, at least for fact-checkers, narratives cannot be pointed out unless they have been pushed time and time again using demonstrably false information.”

The free webinar is presented as a gift to journalists and the fact-checking community in honor of International Fact-Checking Day, a global celebration of truth and accuracy. 

“This is a critical moment for fact-checking journalists to move beyond debunking single claims and start tracing how false narratives take shape and spread,” said Angie Drobnic Holan

Continue reading the announcement here. 

The world’s fact-checkers will convene in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at the Fundação Getulio Vargas for the 12th annual GlobalFact summit from June 25 to 27. Registration for the public opens is now open, with tickets on sale at globalfact12.com.

Presented by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter, GlobalFact is the world’s largest and most impactful summit for professional fact-checking. Every year, fact-checkers come together to address industry-wide challenges, exchange best practices and build collaborative solutions to improve our shared information ecosystem.

This year, fact-checkers will discuss the latest developments in their field and implications for trust and accuracy in 2025 and beyond. Topics include tech platform policies, international regulations and information integrity’s role in democracy. The Brazilian conference setting highlights the importance of local contexts and provides regional perspectives on how online environments contribute to public information and knowledge.

Continue reading here.