Fact-Checking Movement

The fact-checking movement refers to organized efforts to promote, support, and institutionalize the practice of external fact-checking by journalists and other civil-society actors. External fact-checking consists of publishing an evidence-based assessment of the truthfulness or accuracy of a political claim, a news report, an online rumor, or any other public text. (In contrast, conventional, internal fact-checking by journalists or others aims to correct errors prior to making a text public.) This activity goes by different names depending on the focus; for instance, among practitioners, “debunking” most often means exposing online misinformation such as false news stories or doctored photos, while verifying claims by politicians and other public figures is sometimes called political fact-checking.

Fact-checking began to take shape as an occupational movement in the United States in the mid- to late-2000s. As detailed below, its roots can be traced to the rise of political blogging earlier in that decade as well as to previous experiments with external fact-checking by professional journalists. The fact-checking movement spread rapidly to other countries as both news organizations and civil-society groups followed the example of early U.S. sites such as FactCheck.org and PolitiFact.

At the end of 2019, more than 200 outlets dedicated to various forms of external fact-checking were active in nearly 70 countries, up from perhaps two dozen outlets worldwide a decade earlier. (All data on the number and variety of fact-checkers are from a count maintained by the Duke Reporters Lab at Duke University unless otherwise noted.) The growth of the movement has been propelled by the news industry, charitable foundations, technology companies, and the public sector, as well as by fact checkers themselves, who in 2015 formed their own professional association to support fact-checking around the world. This entry discusses the origins and precursors of the fact-checking movement, its global growth and institutionalization, and emerging trends in fact-checking.