MANILA, Philippines – A majority of fact-checking organizations across the world continued to grow their audiences despite facing significant financial challenges in 2025, a report from the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at the Poynter Institute found.

The State of the Fact-Checkers Report 2025, which surveyed 141 IFCN signatories across 71 countries, was released on April 2 in time for this year’s International Fact-Checkers Day. It found that 62% of organizations reported audience growth, despite 76% of them describing their financial position as either vulnerable or in crisis.

“Those numbers show that there is still a hunger and an interest in fact checks,” said Glenn Kessler, former editor and chief writer of The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, during the report’s virtual launch. “Even with fewer resources, you’re reaching more people.”

Prior to 2025, IFCN said that many of its signatories had been experiencing tighter funding conditions. These were only exacerbated by Meta’s withdrawal from independent fact-checking in the United States in January 2025, as well as the gradual scrapping of US Agency for International Development (USAID) programs until it eventually shut down in July 2025. 

This resulted in 45.3% of fact-checking organizations reporting declines in their revenue. Only 22.6% of organizations considered themselves financially sustainable.

“For many factchecking organizations, financial pressure was not a passing shock,” the report wrote. “It remained a defining condition.”

The link between funding and reputation

To Duuya Bataar, journalist and media entrepreneur with Mongolian Fact Checking Center, the withdrawal of major funding sources did more than just narrow fact-checking organization’s revenue sources.

“The message that they created was not just it didn’t just affect us financially. The drop in reputation and how international organizations, businesses, and individuals treated fact checkers have also changed to a certain extent,” she said during the virtual launch of the IFCN’s report.

This also meant that attracting funding became even more difficult, as it created “a glimmer of distrust” in possible funders, according to Bataar. As a result, this made it even more difficult for fact-checking organizations to diversify their already limited funding resources.

The IFCN’s report found that grants were the only revenue source that increased in 2025, from 45.3% in 2024 to an average of 46.2% in 2025. The Meta and Tiktok fact-checking partnerships, user donations or memberships, advertising, media partnerships, and academic partnerships all declined.

“That left the industry more exposed. Fact-checking organizations entered 2025 with two dominant revenue pillars. By the end of the year, many had only one,” the report said.

Unsurprisingly, funding and financial sustainability remained fact-checkers’ top challenge in 2025, as cited by 89.1% of organizations that responded.

Growing audiences

Despite the financial squeeze, fact-checkers found new ways to reach more people.

“Fact-checkers are following their audiences toward visual and video formats, and the data suggests that strategy is working,” the IFCN said in their report.

This resulted in 62% of the 137 organizations that answered the question saying that their audiences grew in 2025.

During the report’s virtual launch, IFCN director Angie Holan also pointed out the interesting disconnect between this growing reach and reports of declining financial health in fact-checking organizations.

Kessler esponded by saying that the numbers show the continued interest in fact-checking despite funders shying away from the program.

“The bottom line is that people find fact checks interesting, engaging. It fills the need. Their social media feeds are filled with AI slop and with ‘fake news.’ And they want to know what the truth is,” he said.

Bataar added that growing authoritarianism could have also fueled this growing appetite for fact checks.

“When you cannot find sufficient information anywhere, in some places — even from media organizations… then probably more people are turning into fact checks,” she said. “And not just any fact check in any format, but in a format [like video where] people are willing to get information.”

To meet this demand while juggling financial constraints, fact-checking organizations intensified collaboration efforts, with 94.9% of organizations saying that they partnered with at least one type of organization. AI adoption within these fact-checking organizations also became more commonplace, with more than half saying they were now using AI tools in their workflows.

“[These results] offer a snapshot of a global community that absorbed a difficult year and kept working,” the IFCN’s report said. – Rappler.com