Happy Fact-Checking Day – Governments Are Using It to Censor You

Today, on April 2, we celebrate International Fact-Checking Day, and the occasion absolutely warrants recognizing the genuine work. The vocabulary of fact-checking took a decade to build. Terms like "disinformation," "harmful content," and "information integrity" were hammered out by independent journalists, press freedom advocates, and researchers trying to give the public better tools against manipulation.

Poynter's International Fact-Checking Network, launched in 2015, and Europe's EFCSN represent the legitimate side of fact-checking, with independent organizations held to a published code of principles and accountable to their readers rather than their governments. But unfortunately, not everything is sunshine and flowers because the sad reality is that this vocabulary is now the preferred language of the governments and platforms with the most to gain from a less-informed public. Somewhere, there is a certain poetry in that.

Truth as a Trademark, Registered by the State

Governments adopting the language of fact-checking to imprison journalists who contradict them is, at this point, a documented and escalating pattern. For example, Russia's criminal code carries up to 10 years of imprisonment for spreading "fake" information about its military.

What has this led to? Well, In February 2025, a Moscow court placed film critic and journalist Ekaterina Barabash under house arrest under Article 207.3 after she criticized the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By October, Svetlana Khustik, a freelance journalist in Krasnoyarsk, faced the same charge and the same potential decade behind bars for the same category of offense: saying something the Kremlin didn't like.

Russia is the loudest example but not a lone actor. Kyrgyzstan introduced administrative penalties for spreading "false or unreliable" information via mass media in July 2025. In Ethiopia, seven journalists were arrested in a single month in the spring of 2025, several of them on charges of "dissemination of hateful disinformation," a charge flexible enough to cover a journalist who interviewed a grieving father about his son's death at the hands of police.

The scale of this trend is not subtle either. Between 2016 and 2022, journalist imprisonments under misinformation and disinformation laws jumped from 22 to 225 globally, according to CPJ data, a tenfold increase driven almost entirely by governments that had learned to dress repression in the language of information integrity.

It’s as plain as it gets: when a government criminalizes contradiction, it has built a machine with a very thin coat of credibility paint that forces everyone to either stay quiet, self-censor, or risk being dealt with while the ugly truth remains safeguarded.

The Platform Problem Runs in Parallel

At the same time that the governments were tightening "fake news" legislation, the platforms that once funded independent fact-checking were quietly walking away. In January 2025, Meta announced it was ending its third-party fact-checking program in the United States, the program that had paid IFCN-certified organizations to identify and flag false information on Facebook and Instagram. According to Poynter's reporting, a global rollout ending fact-checker funding may follow in 2026.

Meta replaced the program with community notes, a model borrowed from X. The EFCSN responded in March 2026, stating that community notes are inadequate as a standalone solution for addressing harmful misinformation, a position that Meta's own oversight board echoed.

The structural picture behind all of this is bleak, to say the least. RSF's 2025 World Press Freedom Index classified the global state of press freedom as a "difficult situation" for the first time in the history of the index, with 160 out of 180 countries achieving financial stability for their media "with difficulty or not at all."

In countries like Georgia, RSF specifically flagged "foreign influence" laws being used to repress independent journalism under the banner of protecting information integrity. Moreover, USAID's abrupt shutdown simultaneously defunded checkers across Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia, and at least 330 journalists sat behind bars worldwide in 2025, many of them under charges that borrowed exactly this vocabulary.

The pattern is consistent across contexts: platform-level speech control tightens exactly as the independent infrastructure meant to hold it accountable loses its funding.

Celebrating the Right Things, With Both Eyes Open

Genuine independent fact-checking, accountable to a published code of principles, transparent in its methodology, and funded without government strings, is worth defending and celebrating today. That much, I mean sincerely. The IFCN's GlobalFact 2026 conference, coming to Vilnius this June, will bring hundreds of fact-checkers together to grapple with exactly these pressures, and the work those organizations do daily matters.

And yet, the RSF's 2025 press freedom predators list identified state actors explicitly using journalism's own codes to manipulate information for propaganda purposes. ARTICLE 19 has long argued that any government response to disinformation must be grounded in international freedom of expression standards rather than deployed as an all-purpose speech restriction tool.

Those two facts together describe the crisis clearly: the vocabulary of truth has been captured by the people it was built to scrutinize, while the organizations that built it are being defunded, deplatformed, and, in dozens of countries, imprisoned.

If governments get to define what counts as fake news, today is not a celebration of fact-checking. It is a printed list of which opinions have been approved, and the holiday is just the occasion they chose to hand it out. So… Happy Fact-Checking Day?