Europe 1 with AFP 12:24 p.m., April 8, 2024

Fact-checkers face a wave of harassment and threats in their work against disinformation. As elections loom around the world, journalists face increasing challenges in combating fake news, according to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). 

India, South Korea, Croatia, North Macedonia… Across the world, digital investigation teams, or fact-checkers, are subject to repeated harassment and threats for their work against disinformation. In this election year for so many countries around the world, those fighting against false information, journalists in particular, are seeing obstacles multiply, while generative artificial intelligence further expands the field of deception. 

The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), an organization of which AFP is a part, asked 137 fact-checking organizations from 69 countries around the world what their problems were. The first? Their finances. Thus, in South Korea, the verification center of the Seoul National University fears having to close its doors after its first donor ended its participation. The result of “political pressure” by the ruling party, according to the director of the fact-checking center, Chong Eun-ryung.

Fact-checking Net, another team in the country, closed last year after the government ended its subsidies. South Koreans are called to the polls on Wednesday.

Security measures 

“Fact checkers are facing ever more work, but their resources are limited,” summarizes Angie Drobnic Holan, the American boss of the IFCN. She also points out "the campaigns of harassment, digital and legal, against fact-checkers carried out by those who prefer a brutal information war, without counterweight based on evidence and logic". Thus, 72% of the organizations surveyed report experiencing harassment.

After death threats and insults online, the Croatian site Faktograf.hr must now resort to security measures. A member of the team was threatened with having his fingers “cut off”. “We had to find a solution” to cope, explains boss Ana Brakus.

In India, Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of the digital investigative organization Alt News and a notorious thorn in the side of the Modi government, denounced the "self-censorship" of the media, some of which he said have become mere "spokespersons" power. He was briefly jailed in 2022 after an anonymous Twitter user accused him of insulting a Hindu god in a four-year-old tweet.

The government of Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, well on course to be returned to power following elections at the end of April, is accused of attacking press freedom.

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Censorship

Fact-checking organizations also see criticism escalating into harassment about their work on social media. The AFP, like other media around the world, is paid by certain technological platforms (Meta, Google, TikTok) as part of the fight against disinformation. Truthmeter, a digital investigation service of a foundation in North Macedonia, paid the price at the beginning of the year, accused of practicing a form of censorship by verifying publications on Facebook. The massive wave of defamation suffered went as far as insults and "thinly veiled threats of calls for violence", according to the organization.

These “disinformation campaigns” will “continue, especially in the pre-election period,” fears Truthmeter. The small Balkan country is due to hold elections in a few weeks. The same is true in the United States, where, a few months before the November elections, conservatives accuse social networks of practicing censorship disguised as fact-checking. “Ironically,” continues Angie Drobnic Holan, the boss of the IFCN, “this obviously misleading argument aims to eradicate criticism and debate.”