The International Fact-Checking Network brought together more than 300 journalists and researchers from across the globe this week in Vilnius, Lithuania, for GlobalFact 2026, the 13th annual conference. This essay is adapted from the opening welcome of the IFCN director.
I wasn’t sure what our annual gathering of fact-checking journalists would look like in 2026. Fact-checking has not had an easy time of it lately.
We have been under attack by political players who would shirk accountability for their false messages. We’ve been accused of bias even when we made every effort to be fair and nonpartisan. We’ve watched our business models erode — undercut by AI-generated summaries and monopolistic platforms that profit from attention without investing in accuracy. And we’ve seen our funding streams deliberately choked off by those who understood exactly what they were doing.
Many of us have had to reduce staff. Some had to ask our teams to do more with less — and watched good people burn out under the weight of it.
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