Open-source investigators and OSINV journalists have spent the last decade turning publicly available data into evidence of war crimes, environmental harms, and human rights abuses. More recently, they have trained the same lens on a different target: the algorithms, bot networks, and generative AI systems that industrialise deception and information disorder.

Fact-checking on social media matters more than ever. When Meta abandoned professional fact checkers in 2025 in favour of crowd-sourced annotations, it bet that community participation could substitute for institutional expertise. Our systematic review of 21 empirical studies of social media fact-checking (2022–2025) suggests the picture is more complicated than it appears.

When 54 international experts assessed AI-generated disinformation threats, they revealed a surprising pattern: while video deepfakes received the highest average threat ratings in the political domain (M = 6.31/7), the pattern differed in the health domain, where AI-generated text received the highest average rating (M = 5.80).

This article examines how fact checkers in the EU perceive and respond to tensions between their journalistic commitment to political fact-checking and platform partnership rules that restrict the rating of politicians’ claims. Drawing on interviews and survey responses, we find that they understand their work through a journalistic role conception, including a commitment to scrutinizing political elites.

Climate change amplifies natural disasters, posing an existential threat to our society. However, a digital storm is raging on right-wing extremist Telegram channels where climate disinformation works to delegitimize scientific consensus. Investigating the factors that amplify climate disinformation is as critical to combating it as understanding natural disasters and their drivers. We

In the October 2024 flash floods in Spain, social media posts falsely claimed authorities were concealing the number of casualties. The narrative centered on a flooded parking structure in Valencia, where hundreds of bodies were falsely claimed to be trapped. This narrative gained traction even after videos showing the premises had been evacuated.