Facing the Truth: Information Threats and the Shifting Landscape of Fact-Checking

Global digital interconnectedness enables misleading or false messages to spread at unprecedented speed, scope and scale around the world.

These challenges led to the emergence of new professional practices focused on safeguarding information integrity and credibility which have become essential tools in defending democracy against so-called "fake news" or disinformation – communications deliberately intended to deceive and cause public harm.

Fact-checking is the systematic process of verifying or debunking public claims and misleading information and is at the fore of these efforts.  However, individuals, groups, or organisations that are controlled, funded, or otherwise supported by autocratic states and their proxies are increasingly targeting fact-checking organisations to discredit their credibility, manipulate public perception of verified information and undermine public confidence in trustworthy institutions and media.

Fact-checking exemplifies key challenges that the IMITATE3 research program seeks to address through its focus on Events, Evolution, and Effects:

How has fact-checking evolved?

Fact-checking has undergone significant expansion and evolution, extending far beyond the newsroom. Fuelled by rapid technological advancements, shifting geopolitical dynamics, and integration into content moderation systems, fact-checking has been increasingly adopted, adapted and studied across many sectors, from media to government, academia and security policy frameworks.

From the early 2000s, fact-checking grew through dedicated efforts by leading organisations. This laid the groundwork for shared standards and ethical guidelines. From 2018, it galvanised into international cooperation networks the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), and their annual global event, the Global Fact Summit. IFCN members adhere to a strict Code of Principles focused on transparency, fairness, non-partisanship, and rigorous methodology in fact-checking. Organisations must comply with these principles and undergo further checks to receive certification, affirming their credibility and transparency.

An "infodemic" of false or misleading content spread rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic. One study collected more than two thousand COVID-19–related infodemic reports from December 2019 to April 2020, across 87 countries in 25 languages, and found that misinformation fuelled by rumours, stigma, and conspiracy theories was highly prevalent, with the majority (82%) of the assessed claims being false.

The pseudo-documentary “Plandemic” which promoted a series of falsehoods about COVID-19 gained at least 8 million views across major social media platforms within days of its release, prompting large social media platforms to integrate fact-checking into their efforts to moderate content. Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking Program compensated partners for verifying social media content rather than political claims. This "debunking turn" transformed fact-checkers into independent moderators of social networks, labelling posts found to be inaccurate to curtail their visibility and providing users with additional contextual information.

Fact-checking has evolved into a collaborative effort involving diverse actors, from journalists and researchers to editors and social media managers. Fact-checking practices have been embedded into information-security frameworks amid geopolitical conflicts, with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine highlighting fact-checking as a key frontline tool against state-sponsored disinformation.

Tracking the prominence and diversification of digital data and social media, fact-checkers continue to evolve their approaches, from short-term claim-based verification to long-term advocacy-oriented investigations. Modern approaches include relying on automated systems, incorporating natural language processing and machine learning to detect and verify misleading content across text, images, and video. Practitioners skilled in open-source digital investigation address the origins and intricacies of increasingly complex forms of disinformation. Since 2014, Bellingcat have pioneered the use of open-source research to uncover and verify complex events of public interest. They made headlines by exposing the main suspects in the 2018 poison attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal in the UK and their connection to Russian military intelligence (GRU).

Weaponisation tactics

The growth of fact-checking organisations and methods within Western democratic society is perceived as a threat by authoritarian regimes because of their active defence of democratic values and, by extension, the current world order.  However, the credibility and legitimacy that fact-checking has earned now make it a valuable tool that adversaries can use in their attempts to control information. To advance Russia's strategic goals, fact checking is adopted both as a defensive shield, to shape and protect domestic narratives, and as an offensive weapon, to destabilize its opponents by manipulating evidence.

Russia-led weaponisation tactics to exploit fact-checking illustrate their growing investment in undermining fact-checking efforts and attempts to exert greater control over global information environments. We identify five key tactics that Russia and its state-linked operations have adopted during their war in Ukraine:

Challenges

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, fact-checking has become a highly influential and respected practice, with strong adoption and adaptation across global sectors. However, the fact-checking community faces unprecedented challenges. Capitalising on global vulnerabilities and public disaffection, Russia has pursued its own global fact-checking alliance by replicating IFCN processes and principles. In effect, this acts as a counter-alliance to the Western model, exposing to targeted countries in the Global South what it claims are Western fabrications whilst at the same promoting Russia's own digital literacy expertise on the world stage.

Russia has targeted Bellingcat through sustained smear campaigns, legal and political pressure and intimidation. In 2021, the state designated the group a “foreign agent,” has incessantly published articles criticising and dismissing its findings, and has targeted the group’s journalists. Most recently, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) released a false statement based on an AI-generated video, accusing a Bellingcat journalist of involvement in a Ukrainian-British plot to hijack a Russian jet.

Yet Russia’s strategic use of fact-checking represents only one dimension of the pressures confronting the field. The sheer volume and speed of information circulating on social media overwhelms fact-checkers’ human capacity to verify content, and the widening gap between finite detection technologies and increasingly sophisticated AI-driven manipulation makes false content harder to identify than ever. Fact-checkers are also under mounting pressure from an increasingly polarised political environment that has seen large social media platforms retreat from the fact checking space. Their work has become more vulnerable as major platforms scale back their fact-checking partnerships and instead shift toward community-driven or AI-based moderation systems. META’s recent move in the United States to reduce professional fact-checking in favour of a “community notes” style crowdsourced model, for example, underscores this shift, and there is growing uncertainty over whether the EU will follow.

Layered onto this are broader challenges including declining public trust in the media, accusations of political bias, and ongoing debates around freedom of speech. Together, these factors contribute to serious societal and behavioural consequences, including a global information environment increasingly polluted with false content produced both domestically and abroad. Ultimately, this convergence of pressures makes it harder than ever for the public to distinguish fact from fiction.

Conclusion

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine marked a significant escalation in its offensive against Western fact-checking efforts and information integrity, illustrating the kind of complex "Event" that IMITATE3 aims to analyse within influence operations. The Kremlin intensified its global campaign to justify the war, undermine Ukraine’s legitimacy, and erode Western support, exemplifying how such disinformation "evolves" by adapting its narratives and tactics in response to countermeasures and shifting geopolitical contexts. Understanding these escalatory tactics matters, not only because they exploit vulnerabilities in the fact-checking ecosystem, but also because they have measurable "effects" on public trust, political polarization, and global stability.

Russia leverages these fractures in political and global cohesion to deepen polarization, engineer influence, and carve out strategic advantages in a contested new world order. In this light, Russia’s informational confrontation with its adversaries not only supports its military objectives in Ukraine, but also aims to reshape international power relations, firmly placing fact-checking and information resilience as critical battlegrounds for democracy and truth. Tracking and identifying these information threats is an integral part of IMITATE3’s programme to deliver robust​,​​ ​innovative insights and evidence about ​how​​ ​foreign state information operations seek to shape public perceptions and political decision-making.