Explore All Articles

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).

Fact-checking saw a rapid expansion in the mid 2010s when major social media platforms, especially Meta, started funding these activities. Today, however, fact checkers stand at a critical juncture. The early 2020s brought them three interrelated yet distinct crises: financial, technological, and legitimacy crises.

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.

Not all misinformation consequences are equal. Faced by hundreds of thousands of false claims online and offline every day, fact checkers need a robust way to identify the important ones to check. This scalable model—used by fact checkers in trials in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East since 2024—helps forecast the potential imminent and cumulative harms of different false claims and is an early warning system for society that focuses efforts on factually false claims that cause real-world harms.

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.