After years of explosive growth, fact check is entering a period of relative stability. As of the end of 2022, we found 453 active fact-checking projects around the world, down slightly from last year’s peak of 459. The flat trajectory could be partly due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused many groups to rejigger their teams and add health coverage to beats that typically focused on politics, hoaxes and digital scams.
The number of new fact-checkers has also leveled off. In the first five months of 2025, the Reporters’ Lab counted only 11 new sites, and so far this year there have been eight additions. We believe that this steadying of the influx of new fact-checkers is a good thing. It’s important for the field that major organizations establish consistent and reliable fact-checking practices, so that people can trust the assessments of these sites.
For example, when Snopes and PolitiFact agree on whether a claim is true or false, this helps to reduce the spread of misinformation because people can more confidently rely on their evaluations (Marietta et al., 2015).
We recently launched a tool to help fact-checkers track their work over time, and it has already been used hundreds of times. MediaVault, which was developed with support from the Google News Initiative, allows journalists to save social media posts that they are checking and to create public-facing links to those posts. The tool is available free to researchers and others working to debunk misinformation shared online.