For the first time in the Duke Reporters’ Lab count, three-times as many fact-checkers closed their doors as opened them last year.
Our tally shows 10 new fact-checking projects in 2025, compared with more than 30 that stopped posting.
And that trend has continued into the first half of this year, with the overall count of fact-checking projects dropping from 441 at the end of 2025 to 437 as of June 1.
One notable departure was longtime fact-checker Glenn Kessler, who took a buyout last July from The Washington Post, which then abandoned its influential Fact Checker column after almost 20 years of publishing.
When Kessler received the Nellie Bly Award for investigative reporting in October, he said the Post’s failure to replace him was “a tragedy, especially in an era of lies and when democracy is under assault.”
Journalists and researchers who call out falsehoods have been scrambling to deal with a difficult funding environment. Fact-checkers often rely on funding from social platforms, philanthropic grants, and public donations, but many organizations have reduced their funding in the last few years. In early 2025, the social media giant Meta ended its fact-checking program in the United States.
Three-fourths of the more than 100 fact-checkers around the world surveyed by the International Fact-Checking Network have reported being financially vulnerable or in crisis. Nearly half saw a decline in revenue and more than a third cut staff members last year.
Staying Afloat
Despite the challenging times, the vast majority of projects have continued their work of countering false political claims and debunking social media misinformation. The Reporters’ Lab’s overall count is down about 4 percent since last June.
The number of fact-checking projects is still more than double what it was 10 years ago. There were about 180 fact-checking projects at the end of 2016, compared to nearly 440 today.
More than 80 projects are fact-checking in countries judged particularly dangerous for journalism by Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index. Among them are about two dozen projects in India and multiple outlets in Bangladesh, Hong Kong and Egypt.
About 30 percent of organizations responding to the IFCN survey said they faced government pressure or interference from authorities, and almost two-thirds received harassment.
Rosie Pioth, the founder of Fact-Check Congo, left the Republic of the Congo after receiving threats for her reporting on the July anniversary of the bombing of the Maya-Maya International Airport in Brazzaville in 1982.
“I knew I was taking a risk doing this kind of investigation, but I never imagined having to get out [of the country] so suddenly and leave my family behind,” she told El País in January. “…Today, I’m safe. But I’m facing significant material and administrative hardship.”
Ups and Downs
Fact-checking projects are currently active in 116 countries and 70 languages, according to the Reporters’ Lab count.
The losses to the overall total in 2025 were fairly evenly distributed among regions, with Africa, Asia, Europe, and North and South America each losing a handful of fact-checking projects. Australia held steady at four projects, after losing two back in 2024.
The number of fact-checking projects in the United States dropped from 65 at the end of 2024 to 61 a year later.
While projects have come and gone each year since the Reporters’ Lab began tracking in 2014, there was steady growth until 2022, when the increase slowed significantly. The numbers shifted only marginally in 2023 and 2024 before last year’s double-digit net loss.
The Ireland-based Logically Facts ceased publication in 2025 after losing its Meta and TikTok revenue, and fewer local stations are participating in the American broadcast group Tegna’s VERIFY initiative since it ended its centralized effort last February.
But there have been new additions as well, such as local newsrooms in the U.S. signing up to produce “fact briefs” that give yes or no answers about factual claims as part of the Gigafact project. They include the CT Mirror in Connecticut, the North Dakota News Cooperative and the San José Spotlight in California.
New fact-checking projects have also emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Thibitisha Fact began publishing in early 2025, and in South Sudan, where The ClarityDesk got its start last June.
The well-known conservative site The Dispatch, which had vowed to continue despite Meta ending its fact-checking program in the U.S., hasn’t updated its Fact Check section since October, except for a February piece examining claims from President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address.
Steve Hayes, the CEO and editor, said The Dispatch has published articles that included fact-checks in the past few months that were not labeled that way. He hopes to restart the effort soon.
“We’re not moving away from fact-checking. I very much believe in it,” he said.
Reporters’ Lab Director Bill Adair contributed to this report.
About the Reporters’ Lab and its Census
The Duke Reporters’ Lab began tracking the international fact-checking community in 2014, when director Bill Adair organized a group of about 50 people who gathered in London for what became the first Global Fact meeting. Subsequent Global Facts led to the creation of the International Fact-Checking Network and its Code of Principles.
The Reporters’ Lab and the IFCN use similar criteria to keep track of fact-checkers, but use somewhat different methods and metrics. Here’s how we decide which fact-checkers to include in the Reporters’ Lab database and census reports. If you have questions, updates or additions, please contact Erica Ryan.
Previous Fact-Checking Census Reports
Note: The Reporters’ Lab regularly updates our counts as we identify and add new sites to our fact-checking database. As a result, numbers from earlier census reports differ from year to year.
- April 2014
- January 2015
- February 2016
- February 2017
- February 2018
- June 2019
- June 2020
- June 2021
- June 2022
- June 2023
- June 2024
- June 2025
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