Fact-checking Is For All

Happy International Fact-Checking Day!

The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), based in Florida, began celebrating this day from 2016, to underline the importance of the work that fact-checkers do worldwide but more importantly, as a reminder to all of us that facts matter. Not just to journalists and institutions but to society as a whole. 

Facts are central to democracy because they empower us with the information we need to make the right decisions. Whether as citizens or individuals, we choose. From what to put at the dinner table to whom to elect as our representative in the state legislature or the Parliament. We make choices about how we spend our moments or years, utilise our resources and in the process, shape our lives and the world around us. Access to facts ensures that we are actually choosing what we want, rather than being led into believing that we are. 

Believing is Seeing

Often, providing bare facts reveals the truth that someone wants hidden. Vested interests deploy factories of disinformation to generate  narratives that create alternate realities and obfuscate the truth. 

Facts can be hidden, buried, distorted, misrepresented or de-contextualised. So, fact-checking is not merely about sifting through the clutter of information to dig out the facts but often also about informing audiences about how juxtaposition of facts, stripped of their context, has distorted what is real. “Seeing is believing”, goes the old adage. Flip it on its head and you get what we, fact-checkers, encounter daily in our work: Believing is seeing. 

We see what psychologists refer to as the confirmation bias —  which Britannica defines as, “People’s tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with their existing beliefs.” —  at play every day as we debunk dozens of falsehoods in each fact-checking newsroom.

The factories of disinformation fool many into seeing what they want to believe, creating unwitting armies of misinformants. 

Misinformant is not a term you will find in the dictionary. I just created it to underline a growing set of those who have been successfully disinformed and now believe a falsehood or a misleading narrative (because it aligns with their bias) and peddle that misinformation, looking to convince others of this alternate reality. 

Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), then, is a force multiplier for those creating alternate realities or creating images of what you believe for you to see – with words, written or spoken, or images, still or moving. Paradoxically, AI can also catalyse the process of fact-checking and help scale up operations. 

The Present and Future of Fact-checking 

The IFCN’s State Of The Fact-Checkers Report 2024, released two days ago, describes AI both as a key challenge and a potential solution. While nearly a third of the fact-checkers surveyed have integrated AI into their work, the rest remain cautious.  “As AI-driven misinformation grows, demand for advanced verification tools continues to outpace availability,” the report observes.

The IFCN began as a group of 30 fact-checking organisations in 2015 and is now more than 170-strong. Yet, every year, the challenges that fact-checkers face have also grown. The report (that collected responses from 141 of these fact-checking organisations across 67 countries) reveals how the fact-checking ecosystem believes 2025 could well be a year of crisis for the industry. 

Partially, the gloom comes from tech giant Meta’s decision to end Third Party Fact-Checking (TPFC) – an arrangement under which participating fact-checkers flag dis/misinformation on Meta’s social media platforms – in the US, and the uncertainty about whether it will continue in the rest of the world. 

Nine of 10 fact-checking organisations worldwide are worried about funding and sustainability. Nearly half the organisations cite Meta’s TPFC programme as their biggest source of funding. Funding remains a key challenge – almost two-thirds of the respondents cite limited funding as a major obstacle, particularly for smaller fact-checking organisations. 

Meta’s exit will not merely affect funding but could cause a spike in dis/misinformation as platform moderation policies often fail to curb the spread of viral misinformation effectively.

Apart from AI-led misinformation, election-related falsehoods surged in 2024, which saw the largest number of elections on the planet in the history of mankind. 90% of respondents fact-checked political or election-related misinformation. 

Fact-checking matters

While the fact-checking ecosystem struggles to find answers to the sustainability and funding question, here are some more key statistics from the report that put things into perspective. Almost all organisations (96.4%) do not keep their content behind a paywall. Even more than political misinformation, fact-checkers debunked falsehoods related to social issues (95.7%) and public health (92.1%) in 2024. The relevance of facts in these critical areas affects all of us, not just fact-checkers. The solution to the crisis that fact-checkers anticipate in 2025 should be a society-wide response, and not be treated like an industry-specific problem.

Tags

• Fact Check
• Facts Matter
• International Fact-Checking Day
• International Fact-Checking Network