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?<\/p>\n
Iran may be outgunned on the battlefield, but the country is holding its own in information warfare. Report<\/a> after report<\/a> has documented its propaganda network. Iran\u2019s 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\u2019s alive.) Iran\u2019s Lego videos have gone viral<\/a>. And there\u2019s evidence<\/a> that Russia and China are amplifying Iran\u2019s propaganda.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014\u00a0or 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> about it. X\u2019s 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 \u201ccensorship industrial complex.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s content decisions.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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\u2019t get enough ratings. It\u2019s just a poor excuse for an anti-disinformation effort,\u201d said Carlos Hern\u00e1ndez-Echevarr\u00eda, a policy expert and member of Spain\u2019s fact-checking group Maldita.<\/p>\n He also noted that Meta\u2019s fact-checking programs in other parts of the world are still proving their worth. Europe\u2019s fact-checkers attached notes<\/a> 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\u2019t willing to invest.<\/p>\n It\u2019s not just platforms, though. After Musk fed USAID \u201cinto the wood chipper,\u201d as he said, independent and pro-democracy media lost millions of dollars \u2014\u00a0an 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.<\/p>\n The political attacks aren\u2019t 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\u2019t support themselves, we risk losing the main means of sustaining high-quality information. If there\u2019s less journalism online, then less content goes into AI, starting a negative reinforcement cycle.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 including major wire services like Reuters and The Associated Press, as well as longstanding independent newsrooms like PolitiFact and FactCheck.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 or 72% \u2014 focused on Iran-related claims. The demand for this work is undeniable.<\/p>\n