Fact checkers should maintain high standards of accountability because they hold unique positions in society by verifying content that can influence political practices and society as a whole. To maintain these professional standards, fact-checking network organizations such as the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN) have established codes of standards, and fact-checking organizations should comply with them in a substantive way.

Fact-checking has become a key response to disinformation during crises and conflicts, but its role is increasingly contested due to concerns about its effectiveness and its co-optation by different political actors. In polarized, high-choice environments, fact-checking is often embedded within partisan and state-aligned infrastructures, shaping validation and rejection of knowledge claims.

Major platforms constantly claim to fight disinformation and support the fact checking community, but their transparency reports and the empirical evidence from a survey of expert fact checkers across 21 EU countries show a different reality. This study finds that despite commitments made under EU regulations, expert fact checkers remain largely peripheral actors within the existing platform governance framework, with limited insight into how their work influences platform decisions.

Social media platforms are increasingly using community-based verification systems, such as Community Notes, and AI systems to flag and contextualize potentially misleading content at scale. While these approaches promise speed and broad coverage, concerns about accuracy, bias, and transparency persist. Drawing on interviews with 29 fact checkers, we find that practitioners see community-based verification and AI Note Writers as complementary tools that can support, but not replace, professional fact-checking.

Media have made misinformation conversations part of daily life. We looked at nearly four decades’ worth of news stories about misinformation to see exactly what this coverage looked like. We searched five major U.S. daily newspapers for articles containing the misinformation-related terms—disinformation, misinformation, conspiracy theory, fake news, and propaganda—then extracted words in proximity to these key terms to identify associative patterns.

We conducted an expert survey of almost a hundred academics, fact checkers, and journalists who actively work towards mitigating disinformation and providing policy advice in the European context to examine whether they share views on generative artificial intelligence’s (AI) role in disinformation.

Rather than assuming that people are motivated to fact-check, we investigated the process that people go through when and if they encounter political misinformation. Using a digital diary method, we asked 38 participants to collect examples of political misinformation during Australia’s 2025 federal election and explain why they determined it to be misinformation (n = 254).

In today’s digital media environment, emotionally resonant narratives often spread faster and stick more firmly than verifiable facts. This paper explores how emotionally charged communication in online controversies fosters not only widespread engagement but also the participatory nature of misinformation. Through a case study of a K-pop controversy, we show how audiences act not just as consumers but as co-authors of alternative narratives in moments of uncertainty.

Boosting psychological defences against misleading content online is an active area of research, but transition from the lab to real-world uptake remains a challenge. We developed a 19-second prebunking video about emotionally manipulative content and showed it as a Story Feed ad to N = 375,597 Instagram users in the United Kingdom.