President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have been determined to dismantle fact-checking journalism, both in the United States and around the world. Are they having regrets now?
Iran may be outgunned on the battlefield, but the country is holding its own in information warfare. Report after report has documented its propaganda network. Iran’s messaging efforts include mocking Trump, promoting false military wins and sowing discord and confusion by claiming, for example, that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was dead. (He’s alive.) Iran’s Lego videos have gone viral. And there’s evidence that Russia and China are amplifying Iran’s propaganda.
Now that the United States is on the receiving end of waves of disinformation from Iran, the Trump administration is looking for solutions and not finding much — or not much that would be believed by a skeptical public, both here and especially abroad. The State Department recently ordered its embassies to use X to correct the record, a move that can only be considered feeble for myriad reasons.
Over the last year, Trump and his allies have fought fact-checking journalism and other accuracy safeguards on X and other platforms at every turn. Trump crowed when Meta dismantled its U.S. fact-checking program last year, and still brags about it. X’s Elon Musk joined the administration to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, a foreign assistance fund that supported scores of international independent fact-checking programs. And a congressional committee headed by Rep. Jim Jordan has worked overtime to dismantle disinformation research at universities and recast independent journalism as part of a “censorship industrial complex.”
I’ve witnessed the dismantling of U.S. efforts to fight disinformation and encourage accuracy as director of the International Fact-Checking Network, a member association for worldwide fact-checking newsrooms.
But it’s not just fact-checkers: Trump has gone after journalists, universities, medicine, the legal profession and science. If an industry has mechanisms to independently verify evidence while resisting political pressure, Trump has attacked it.
That mentality is now paying terrible dividends. Platforms like X and Meta have ditched professional fact-checking for community notes, a system that has lots of promise in theory but is troubled in practice. Bad actors can game the system to suppress notes, and casual users have little incentive to write notes in the first place, findings recently reiterated in a report from the Meta Oversight Board, an independent body designed to review Meta’s content decisions.
“The people writing the notes become tired of not seeing notes become visible, so they stop writing notes. Then we enter this vicious circle of AI-generated notes that don’t get enough ratings. It’s just a poor excuse for an anti-disinformation effort,” said Carlos Hernández-Echevarría, a policy expert and member of Spain’s fact-checking group Maldita.
He also noted that Meta’s fact-checking programs in other parts of the world are still proving their worth. Europe’s fact-checkers attached notes to 35 million posts on Facebook in the first six months of 2026. During the same period in the United States, 900 community notes appeared. Professional fact-checkers have tenacity and time that ordinary users aren’t willing to invest.
It’s not just platforms, though. After Musk fed USAID “into the wood chipper,” as he said, independent and pro-democracy media lost millions of dollars — an estimated $247 million in annual spending. The exact types of programs that would have challenged false Iran-backed narratives were immediately defunded across the Middle East and Africa; in Ukraine and Eastern Europe; and in parts of Latin America. Those programs were funded for decades on the belief that they would build democracy; they were also very good at debunking attacks from autocratic regimes like Iran.
The political attacks aren’t the only headwind; a lack of sustainable business models is holding back independent journalism. As people turn to AI agents to answer questions and find detailed information, publishers are seeing less traffic to websites. That limits the growth of subscriptions and advertising. AI was built with all the knowledge of the internet, but if publishers can’t support themselves, we risk losing the main means of sustaining high-quality information. If there’s less journalism online, then less content goes into AI, starting a negative reinforcement cycle.
Yet for all the attacks, the fact-checking community has shown resilience. Of 14 U.S. fact-checking newsrooms that were part of the IFCN when Meta made its announcement, nine are still regularly producing fact checks — including major wire services like Reuters and The Associated Press, as well as longstanding independent newsrooms like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org.
At Agence France-Presse, recent output shows both the scale of the challenge and the response from professional fact-checkers: 744 fact checks were published in March, up from 480 in February, with 540 — or 72% — focused on Iran-related claims. The demand for this work is undeniable.
Worldwide, other newsrooms that would challenge false narratives around warfare are also hanging on. Research from the IFCN released April 2 showed that while many fact-checkers are facing difficulties, their audiences are growing. This information infrastructure can be sustained if we find the funding models.
I don’t expect the Trump administration to understand the peril we’re in regarding information resilience. Losing an information war might not be enough to get Trump to stand down from attacks on independent information. Will others in government try to stop attacks on fact-checking, just at the moment when we need it most? I don’t know.
What I do know is what fact-checkers themselves believe makes their work worth defending. “Nonpartisanship is what separates us from the rest of the noise of the internet,” Katie Sanders, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, told me. “There are a dime-a-dozen voices who can do fact-checking work with a point of view, but it’s just not as valuable as a neutral, carefully reported effort.”
And no one I’ve spoken to is ready to quit. Laura Zommer of Factchequeado, who started fact-checking in Argentina — a country that has lived through coups, economic collapses and authoritarian governments — said she recognized what was happening in the U.S. long before most Americans. The image of tech CEOs clapping and smiling at Trump’s inauguration was especially chilling, because it showed that the tech sector was now taking sides in politics.
Zommer said she’s not stopping. “We are not doing great, but we are in resistance mode, and I’m confident we’re going to continue,” she said. “It’s exactly this time when we need to be doing a history of the facts, creating archives, doing testimonials for the people that won’t listen. If we give up, who’s going to do it?”