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With half the planet going to the polls in 2024, fact-checking sputters

This year’s elections are a global convergence of ballots, checkboxes and thumb prints, with voters in more than 64 countries and all of the European Union heading to the polls. Based on a Time magazine estimate, this democratic spectacle could potentially involve the equivalent of 49% of the planet’s population.

Just one problem: There aren’t enough referees.

A "Mostly False" from EUfactcheck
A “Mostly False” from EUfactcheck, a collaboration among journalism schools that is taking on disinformation during the June elections for the European Parliament.

For most of the past decade and a half, the global fact-checking community served that role, and experienced years of rapid growth. But based on the most recent counts from the Duke Reporters’ Lab, the number of reporting and research teams that routinely intercept political lies and disinformation is plateauing — exactly at the time when the world needs fact-checkers most.

Our latest count showed as many as 457 fact-checking projects in 111 countries were active over the past two years.

But so far in 2024, that number has shrunk to 439.

The runup to June’s sprawling E.U. vote and this fall’s U.S. election campaign may nudge the numbers upward slightly. But a slight upswing is nothing like fact-checking’s rocket-like ascent over the past 15 years.

When PolitiFact won a Pulitzer Prize for its U.S. fact-checking in 2009, the award signaled the potential of this important new form of journalism. At that time, we counted 17 sites that consistently did similar work. 

By 2016, the year of the U.K’s final Brexit referendum and Donald J. Trump’s White House win, the count was 190 — an 11-fold increase. 

Four years later, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic and Trump’s failed reelection campaign, the revised tally for 2020 more than doubled to 421.

Number of Active Fact-checkers Per Year
Note: Because the Reporters’ Lab identifies new fact-checkers and notes inactive ones, the year-by-year counts are regularly revised based on each site’s start and stop dates.

An abrupt shift

In the years since our Lab began producing this annual census in 2014, fact-checking has become an international enterprise — quickly growing the community on six of the seven continents. Until it didn’t.

In Asia, for instance, the numbers of fact-checking operations and bureaus jumped from 94 in 2019 to 124 in 2021 — a 32% increase. And much the same happened in Africa, where 32 fact-checkers in 2019 became 54 in 2021 — up 69%.

But the pace dramatically leveled off over the following years. From 2021 to 2023, the range in Asia’s fact-checking count was between 124 and 130. In Africa, the number hovered around 55.

Number of Fact-checkers by Continent.

The leveling off started earlier in other parts of the world. From 2020 to 2023, the range in Europe was between 120 and 135.

The number in the Americas decreased. From 2020 to 2023, South America went from 44 to 39 while North America went from 94 to 90.

The flatter Earth

Our conversations with fact-checkers indicate a few factors contributed to the flattening. 

Like every industry and institution, fact-checkers had to manage their teams through the pandemic. And in the early days of COVID-19, they also had to rejigger their organizations to cover the slow-motion disaster. That meant adding health reporting to beats that more typically focused on a mix of politics, hoaxes and digital scams.

Fact-checkers, like other journalists, also have struggled to raise money to pay their operating costs.

Atop those challenges, a certain amount of turnover was common in the fact-checking business. Teams in one place would decide to close up shop, often for financial reasons. At the same time, new fact-checkers would start their own ventures.

For most of the past decade, the number of new fact-checking operations far outnumbered the ones that had shut down — often by wide margins. In one year, 2017, the ratio was 11-to-1, with 55 new fact-checkers and five that closed down.

Then there was last year: 2023 was the first time there were more departing fact-checking teams than new ones — 18 closures to 10 starts.

Net new fact-checkers per year

Roughing the refs 

Perhaps the biggest challenge some fact-checking projects face has less to do with the fundamentals of running a newsroom or a research team. It’s about the vitriol that fact-checkers encounter from hostile governments and politicians, as well as their supporters

From Bangladesh to Brazil, scurrilous attempts to undermine fact-checking are familiar tactics, especially for the reporters and researchers who work in countries where press freedom hardly exists.  

Based on data from Reporters Without Borders’ recently released World Press Freedom Index, 69 fact-checking organizations in the Reporters’ Lab list are based in about 20 countries with situations that are rated “very serious.” Starting from the most serious places, those fact-checkers operate in Syria (1), Afghanistan (2), Iran (1), China (5), Myanmar (2), Egypt (4), Iraq (2), Cuba (1), Belarus (1), Saudi Arabia (1), Bangladesh (5), Azerbaijan (1), India (26), Turkey (3), Venezuela (3), Yemen (2), Pakistan (2), Cambodia (1), Sri Lanka (5) and Sudan (1). The list from Reporters Without Borders also counts Palestine, where there are at least three fact-checking teams. Palestine is between Turkey and Venezuela in the Index.

Even in less dangerous places, politicians have enlisted companies and institutions to use economic pressure against fact-checkers.

The fact-checking community saw multiple examples in 2023. In South Korea, conservative politicians pressured the country’s leading search engine, Naver, to cancel its financial support for SNU FactCheck — a project of the Seoul National University Institute of Communications Research. Since 2017, SNU FactCheck’s director, EunRyung Chong, worked with her country’s leading media organizations to showcase fact-checking reports using a shared system for rating questionable claims — especially the claims of politicians. Naver not only dropped its financial support, but it also took away SNU FactCheck’s access to the search company’s audience. Ultimately, the European Climate Foundation, a nonpartisan organization based in the Netherlands, stepped in to provide support that allowed SNU FactCheck and its media partners to continue their work — including coverage of last month’s National Assembly election.

In Australia, conservative politicians were more successful in derailing a years-long partnership between the country’s ABC News network and RMIT University. Egged on by the conservative outlets of News Corp Australia, lawmakers attacked the reporting of RMIT ABC Fact Check based on claims of bias and misuse of public funds. ABC has since announced its plans to sever the collaboration with the university and launch a new program aimed at misinformation.

Agence France-Presse is one of the largest fact-checking organizations, with teams posted in dozens of bureaus around the world. The French news agency lists most of the participating journalists — but not all. “While we endeavour to be as transparent as possible about our staff, some countries and environments are more hostile than others when it comes to journalism,” the list notes. “For that reason, some of the journalists on our… team will not be named below to protect their safety. ”

[June 6, 2024: This article was updated to better characterize the reasons that led to the end of the RMIT ABC Fact Check partnership after seven years.]

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 Mark Stencel, Erica Ryan or Joel Luther.

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.

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Fact-checking census shows slower growth

Fact-checkers are now found in at least 102 countries – more than half the nations in the world. 

The latest census by the Duke Reporters’ Lab identified 341 active fact-checking projects, up 51 from last June’s report.

But after years of steady and sometimes rapid growth, there are signs that trend is slowing, even though misleading content and political lies have played a growing role in contentious elections and the global response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Our tally revealed a slowdown in the number of new fact-checkers, especially when we looked at the upward trajectory of projects since the Lab began its yearly survey and global fact-checking map seven years ago. 

The number of fact-checking projects that launched since the most recent Reporters’ Lab census was more than three times fewer than the number that started in the 12 months before that, based on our adjusted tally. 

From July 2019 to June 2020, there were 61 new fact-checkers. In the year since then, there were 19.

Meanwhile, 21 fact-checkers shut down in that same two-year period beginning in June 2019. And 54 additions to the Duke database in that same period were fact-checkers that were already up and running prior to the 2019 census.

Looking at the count by calendar year also underscored the slowdown in the time of COVID. 

The Reporters’ Lab counted 36 fact-checking projects that launched in 2020. That was below the annual average of 53 for the preceding six calendar years – and less than half the number of startups that began fact-checking in 2019. The 2020 launches were also the lowest number of new fact-checkers we’ve counted since 2014. 

New Fact Checkers by Year

New Fact Checkers by Year
Duke Reporters’ Lab

(Note: The adjusted number of 2020 launches may increase slightly over time as the Reporters’ Lab identifies other fact-checkers we have not yet discovered.)

The slowdown comes after a period of rapid expansion that began in 2016. That was the year when the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom and the presidential race in the United States raised public alarm about the impact of misinformation.

In response, major tech companies such as Facebook and Google elevated fact-checks on their platforms and provided grants, direct funding and other incentives for new and existing fact-checking organizations. (Disclosure: Google and Facebook fund some of the Duke lab’s research on technologies for fact-checkers. )

The 2018-2020 numbers presented below are adjusted from earlier census reports to include fact-checkers that were subsequently added to our database. 

Active Fact-Checkers by Year

2021 Fact-Checking Census
Duke Reporters’ Lab

Note: 2021 YTD includes one fact-checker that closed in 2021. 

Growth has been steady on almost every continent except in North America. In the United States, where fact-checking first took off in the early 2010s, there are 61 active fact-checkers now. That’s down slightly from the 2020 election year, when there were 66. But the U.S. is still home to more fact-checking projects than any other country. Of the current U.S. fact-checkers, more than half (35 of 61) focus on state and local politics. 

Fact-Checkers by Continent

Fact-Checkers by Continent
Duke Reporters’ Lab

Among other details we found in this year’s census:

  • More countries, more staying power: Based on our adjusted count, fact-checkers were active in at least 47 countries in 2014. That more than doubled to 102 now. And most of the fact-checkers that started in 2014 or earlier (71 out of 122) are still active today.

 

  • Fact-checking is more multilingual: The active fact-checkers produce reports in nearly 70 languages, from Albanian to Urdu. English is the most common, used on 146 different sites, followed by Spanish (53), French (33), Arabic (14), Portuguese (12), Korean (11) and German (10). Fact-checkers in multilingual countries often present their work in more than one language – either in translation on the same site, or on different sites tailored for specific language communities, including original reporting for those audiences.

 

  • More than media: Half of the current fact-checkers (195 of 341) are affiliated with media organizations, including national news publishers and broadcasters, local news sources and digital-only outlets. But there are other models, too. At least 37 are affiliated with non-profit groups, think tanks and nongovernmental organizations and 26 are affiliated academic institutions. Some of the fact-checkers involve cross-organization partnerships and have multiple affiliations. But to be listed in our database, the fact-checking must be organized and produced in a journalistic fashion.

 

  • Turnover: In addition to the 341 current fact-checkers, the Reporters’ Lab database and map also include 112 inactive projects. From 2014 to 2020, an average of 15 fact-checking projects a year close down. Limited funding and expiring grants are among  the most common reasons fact-checkers shuttered their sites. But there also are short-run, election year projects and partnerships that intentionally close down once the voting is over. Of all the inactive projects, 38 produced fact-checks for a year or less. The average lifespan of an inactive fact-checker is two years and three months. The active fact-checkers have been in business twice as long – an average of more than four and a half years.

The Reporters’ Lab process for selecting fact-checkers for its database is similar to the standards used by the International Fact Checking Network – a project based at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida. IFCN currently involves 109 organizations that each agree to a code of principles. The Lab’s database includes all the IFCN signatories, but it also counts any related outlets – such as the state-level news partners of PolitiFact in the United States, the wide network of multilingual fact-checking sites that France’s AFP has built across its global bureau system, and the fact-checking teams Africa Check and PesaCheck have mobilized in countries across Africa. 

Reporters’ Lab project manager Erica Ryan and student researchers Amelia Goldstein and Leah Boyd contributed to this year’s report.

About the census: Here’s how we decide which fact-checkers to include in the Reporters’ Lab database. The Lab continually collects new information about the fact-checkers it identifies, such as when they launched and how long they last. That’s why the updated numbers for earlier years in this report are higher than the counts the Lab included in earlier reports. If you have questions, updates or additions, please contact Mark Stencel or Joel Luther.

Ecuador Verifica
Image at top: The fact-checking collaborative Ecuador Verifica (ecuadorverifica.org) launched in January with a traffic-light metaphor to rate claims. The site was one of the 19 new fact-checking projects the Reporters’ Lab added to its database in the past year.

Related Links: Previous fact-checking census reports

April 2014

January 2015

February 2016

February 2017

February 2018

June 2019

June 2020

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U.S. fact-checkers gear up for 2020 campaign

With the U.S. election now less than a year away, at least four-dozen American fact-checking projects plan to keep tabs on claims by candidates and their supporters – and a majority of those fact-checkers won’t be focused on the presidential campaign.

The 50 active U.S. fact-checking projects are included in the latest Reporters’ Lab tally of global fact-checking, which now shows 226 sites in 73 countries. More details about the global growth below.

Of the 50 U.S. projects, about a third (16) are nationally focused. That includes independent fact-checkers such as FactCheck.org, PolitiFact and Snopes, as well as major news media efforts, including the Associated Press, The Washington Post, CNN and The New York Times. There also are a handful of fact-checkers that are less politically focused. They concentrate on global misinformation or specific topic areas, from science to gossip.

At least 31 others are state and locally minded fact-checkers spread across 20 states. Of that 31, 11 are PolitiFact’s state-level media partners. A new addition to that group is WRAL-TV in North Carolina — a commercial TV station that took over the PolitiFact franchise in its state from The News & Observer, a McClatchy-owned newspaper based in Raleigh. Beyond North Carolina, PolitiFact has active local affiliates in California, Florida, Illinois, Missouri, New York, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

The News & Observer has not abandoned fact-checking. It launched a new statewide initiative of its own — this time without PolitiFact’s trademarked Truth-O-Meter or a similar rating system for the statements it checks. “We’ll provide a highly informed assessment about the relative truth of the claims, rather than a static rating or ranking,” The N&O’s editors said in an article announcing its new project.

Among the 20 U.S. state and local fact-checkers that are not PolitiFact partners, at least 13 use some kind of rating system.

Of all the state and local fact-checkers, 11 are affiliated with TV stations — like WRAL, which had its own fact-checking service before it joined forces with PolitiFact this month. Another 11 are affiliated with newspapers or magazines. Five are local digital media startups and two are public radio stations. There are also a handful of projects based in academic journalism programs. 

One example of a local digital startup is Mississippi Today, a non-profit state news service that launched a fact-checking page for last year’s election. It is among the projects we have added to our database over the past month.

We should note that some of these fact-checkers hibernate between election cycles. These seasonal fact-checkers that have long track records over multiple election cycles remain active in our database. Some have done this kind of reporting for years. For instance, WISC-TV in Madison, Wisconsin, has been fact-checking since 2004 — three years before PolitiFact, The Washington Post and AP got into the business.

One of the hardest fact-checking efforts for us to quantify is run by corporate media giant TEGNA Inc. which operates nearly 50 stations across the country. Its “Verify” segments began as a pilot project at WFAA-TV in the Dallas area in 2016. Now each station produces its own versions for its local TV and online audience. The topics are usually suggested by viewers, with local reporters often fact-checking political statements or debunking local hoaxes and rumors. 

A reporter at WCNC-TV in Charlotte, North Carolina, also produces national segments that are distributed for use by any of the company’s other stations. We’ve added TEGNA’s “Verify” to our database as a single entry, but we may also add individual stations as we determine which ones do the kind of fact-checking we are trying to count. (Here’s how we decide which fact-checkers to include.)

A Global Movement

As for the global picture, the Reporters’ Lab is now up to 226 active fact-checking projects around the world — up from 210 in October, when our count went over 200 for the first time. That is more than five times the number we first counted in 2014. It’s also more than double a retroactive count for that same year –- a number that was based on the actual start dates of all the fact-checking projects we’ve added to the database over the past five years (see footnote to our most recent annual census for details).

The growth of Agence France-Presse’s work as part of Facebook’s third-party-fact checking partnership is a big factor. After adding a slew of AFP bureaus with dedicated fact-checkers to our database last month, we added many more — including Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Poland, Lebanon, Singapore, Spain, Thailand and Uruguay. We now count 22 individual AFP bureaus, all started since 2018.

Other recent additions to the database involved several established fact-checkers, including PesaCheck, which launched in Kenya in 2016. Since then it’s added bureaus in Tanzania in 2017 and Uganda in 2018 — both of which are now in our database. We added Da Begad, a volunteer effort based in Egypt that has focused on social media hoaxes and misinformation since 2013. And there’s a relative newcomer too: Re:Check, a Latvian project that’s affiliated with a non-profit investigative center called Re:Baltica. It launched over the summer. 

Peru’s OjoBiónico is back on our active list. It resumed fact-checking last year after a two-year hiatus. OjoBiónico is a section of OjoPúblico, a digital news service that focuses on an investigative reporting service.

We already have other fact-checkers we plan to add to our database over the coming weeks. If there’s a fact-checker you know about that we need to update or add to our map, please contact Joel Luther at the Reporters’ Lab.

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Reporters’ Lab fact-checking tally tops 200

The Reporters’ Lab added 21 fact-checkers to our database of reporting projects that regularly debunk political misinformation and viral hoaxes, pushing our global count over 200.

The database now lists 210 active fact-checkers in 68 countries. That nearly quintupled the number the Reporters’ Lab first counted in 2014. It also more than doubled a retroactive count for that same year – a number that was based on the actual start dates of all the fact-checking projects we’ve added to the database over the past five years (see footnote to our most recent annual census).

The rapid expansion of Agence France-Presse’s fact-checking in its news bureaus since 2018 was a big factor in reaching this milestone — including AFP’s dedicated editors in Hong Kong who coordinate fact-checkers there and across Asia. AFP attributes the growth to the support it receives from Facebook’s third-party fact-checking program. In addition to the Hong Kong bureau, our database now lists AFP fact-checkers in Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, South Africa and Sri Lanka. At least seven of those bureaus began fact-checking in 2019. [Update: We missed a few other AFP bureaus that do fact-checking, which we’ll be adding in our November update.]

The database now lists several other recent additions that also launched in 2019, mainly to focus on upcoming elections. Bolivia Verifica launched in June, four months before this past weekend’s vote, which may be headed for a December runoff. Reverso in Argentina also launched in June, followed by Verificado Uruguay in July. The general elections in those two countries are this coming Sunday.

Other 2019 launches include Namibia FactCheck, GhanaFact and, in the United States, local TV station KCRG-TV’s in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. KCRG is a bit of a special case, since it’s hardly a newbie. The TV station was previously owned by a local newspaper, The Cedar Rapids Gazette. Even after the sale, the two newsrooms collaborated on fact-checking for several years through last year’s U.S. midterm elections. But now they have gone separate ways. Starting in March, the investigative reporting team at KCRG began doing its own fact-checking segments.

At least six other fact-checkers that launched in 2019 were already in our database before this month’s update, several of which were intentionally short-term projects that focused on specific elections. We’re checking on the status of those now. At least one, Global Edmonton’s Alberta Election Fact Check, is already on our inactive list. For that reason, we expect our count might not grow much more before the end of 2019 and might even drop slightly.

In addition to the projects that began in 2019, we also added three established fact-checkers to our database that were already in operation before this year: Local TV station KRIS-TV in Corpus Christi, Texas, has been on the fact-checking beat since 2017. The journalists who do fact-checking for Syria-focused Verify-Sy have worked from locations in Turkey, Europe and within that war-torn country since 2016. And Belgium’s Knack magazine has provided a fact-checking feature to its readers since 2012.

We weren’t sure we would cross the 200 fact-checkers milestone in October, since we also moved seven dormant projects to our separate count of inactive fact-checkers this month. Our count in September was 195 before we made this month’s updates.

If there’s a fact-checker you know about that we need to update or add to our database, please contact Joel Luther at the Reporters’ Lab. (Here’s how we decide which fact-checkers to include.)

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