Who Funded the Fact-Checkers: 45.5% Came From the Platform They Were Rating
October 31, 2026 · Frisian News
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The IFCN's State of the Fact-Checkers report found that 45.5 percent of the average fact-checker's revenue came from Meta before January 2025, the same period those organizations were paid to rate content on Meta's platforms. Separate grant records show a health foundation funded global health fact-checks while its own investments in vaccine companies were under simultaneous review.
The International Fact-Checking Network's State of the Fact-Checkers report, surveying 141 organizations in 71 countries, headlined a finding that 62 percent grew their audiences in 2025. The same report found that 45.5 percent of the average fact-checker's revenue came from Meta before the company ended its United States third-party program in January 2025, and that 76 percent of respondents described their finances as vulnerable or in crisis.
Meta paid fact-checking organizations to rate content on Meta's own platforms. That structure ran for nine years. PolitiFact founder Bill Adair, who also co-founded the IFCN itself, said Meta had provided "millions of dollars" to fact-checkers worldwide. FactCheck.org's own disclosure records show Meta paid the organization $258,320 in fiscal year 2025 for a "fact-checking project to debunk social media misinformation."
The IFCN's code of principles requires signatories to demonstrate that funders have no influence over their conclusions, with compliance assessed by external evaluators rather than self-declared. PolitiFact states publicly that donors have no control over its ratings and no right to review content. FactCheck.org says neither Meta nor Google sought or was given any control over its editorial decisions. These are policy statements. The grant records show a different pattern.
PolitiFact's own published grant list records $126,650 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2016 and $70,000 in 2015, both earmarked for fact-checking claims about global health and development in partnership with Africa Check. Columbia Journalism Review found that PolitiFact and USA Today, both Gates Foundation grant recipients, rated as false the claim that the foundation held financial stakes in COVID vaccine and treatment developers. The foundation's own tax filings showed investments in companies including Gilead and CureVac. Poynter's senior vice president Kelly McBride confirmed the Gates money had passed through to fact-checking partners including Africa Check. She said she was "absolutely confident" no bias emerged from the arrangement, then acknowledged she had not reviewed the work herself.
US government funding followed the same structure. The State Department's Global Engagement Center gave NewsGuard a $25,000 grant in 2020 and funded the Global Disinformation Index with $100,000 in 2021, routed through a contractor called Park Advisors, according to a House Foreign Affairs Committee investigation and a federal inspector general finding. Park Advisors also ran Disinfo Cloud on a separate $3 million GEC grant the State Department had never disclosed, the same inspector general found. NewsGuard separately held a $750,000 contract with the Department of Defense, per NewsGuard's own press materials. Congress declined to renew the GEC at the end of 2024 and the office closed.
The Duke Reporters' Lab counted 437 active fact-checking projects worldwide as of June 1, 2026, down from 451 at the end of 2024. In 2025, ten new projects launched against more than 30 that stopped posting, the first year in the census's history that closures outpaced openings by more than three to one. Article volume fell roughly 6 percent against 2024. Grants now account for 46.2 percent of average revenue, the IFCN report found, displacing Meta as the dominant funding source.
The organizations that decide which claims circulate have not applied their own methodology to the question of who pays them to decide.
Published October 31, 2026 · Frisian News