Fact checkers confront a world awash in lies I attended the 9th annual global summit of fact checkers in Oslo last week, Global Fact — our first in-person meeting in three years. While it was great to catch up with old friends and learn the latest in fact-checking techniques and innovations, it was also sobering. Fact checkers are confronting a world awash in baseless claims promoted by politicians and even governments and increasingly embraced by receptive audiences. The torrent of false information, such as the election-fraud claims that led to the assault on the U.S. Capitol, Russian disinformation about the invasion of Ukraine and pseudoscientific assertions about the coronavirus pandemic, has emerged despite the astonishing growth of the fact-checking movement. In 2021, there were 391 active fact-checking projects, according to an annual census by the Duke Reporters' Lab, up from 168 in 2016. With more than 500 participants from 69 countries, the gathering was twice the size of the last in-person Global Fact summit in Cape Town three years ago. It was barely eight years ago, in 2014, that I was among some three dozen fact-checkers who met for the first time in London at a small college classroom, hoping to spark greater global cooperation. That meeting led to the creation of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), an umbrella organization that is housed at the Poynter Institute. Paradoxically, a substantial role in the growth of fact-checking has been played by Meta, parent company of Facebook and WhatsApp, an encrypted instant messaging and phone service. These social media platforms have come under fire for allowing false information to flourish on their sites. Meta executives announced at the gathering that they have already spent $100 million to help underwrite fact-checking operations in dozens of countries, many of which are paid to flag false information circulating on Facebook. Read our full report on the summit with the link below Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here. Did you hear something fact-checkable? Send it here; we'll check it out. The most popular fact checks of 2022, so far It's the second year of the Biden presidency, but readers appear most interested in fact checks that re-litigate aspects of the 2020 election, especially allegations about Hunter Biden, the president's son. Moreover, yet again, few fact checks about President Biden's utterances made it in the list of the 10 most-read fact checks thus far this year. By a large margin, our continuing coverage of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and his voting record especially captivated readers, with three of our articles on Meadows ending up in the top 10. The Fact Checker's reporting showed that in 2020 Debra Meadows, wife of the former chief of staff, signed at least two forms — a voter registration form and the one-stop application — that warned of legal consequences if falsely completed and signed. Yet Debra Meadows certified that she had resided at a 14-by-62-foot mountaintop mobile home for at least 30 days — even though she did not live there. Our disclosure of this form was the latest in a string of revelations concerning the former chief of staff — who echoed President Donald Trump's false claims of election fraud in 2020 — and his wife. The second most popular fact check concerned Trump's effort to rewrite history on his support of NATO and Ukraine. Trump had lauded Russian President Vladimir Putin as "very savvy" for making a "genius" move by declaring two regions of eastern Ukraine as independent states and dispatching Russian forces to seize them. When Ukraine unexpectedly stood firm against the Russian invasion, Trump scrambled to claim he deserved credit for saving the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. With Trump, it's hard to know whether he's willfully ignorant or whether he has simply swallowed his own spin. Far from being a savior of NATO, he frequently sought to undermine it. The third and fourth most read fact checks involved going through the rabbit hole of allegations concerning Hunter Biden. One involved Russian Defense Ministry claims that the president's son financed "bioweapons labs" in Ukraine. That was ridiculous. The other concerned the claim that Hunter received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina, a Russian billionaire and the widow of the former mayor of Moscow. We found no evidence that Hunter Biden was part of those transactions. We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. You can reach us via email, Twitter (@GlennKesslerWP and @AdriUsero) or Facebook. Read about our process and rating scale here, and sign up for the newsletter here. Scroll down for this week's Pinocchio roundup. | 
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