Asked by sociologists about his views on the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, a Russian in his early 70s shifted the conversation to the massacre in Bucha – one of the worst atrocities committed by the Russian military in Ukraine. Evidence of Russian war crimes was fake, he said: “Take Busha or Bucha or wherever it may be. The way they filmed it, the way the bodies were arranged: it was clearly a fake!”
Two things stand out from this. He parroted, word for word, statements of Russian propaganda about bodies being actors “arranged on the ground”, echoing the claims of War on Fakes, the Kremlin’s imitation of a factchecking organisation. Yet despite his certainty, he did not know anything about the town, to the extent that he could not pronounce its name correctly. Relying on an “anti-fake” outlet modelled on western factchecking, he was not interested in facts but rather in shielding Russia from accusations.
This reaction is illustrative of a wider tendency. Once a new democratic initiative, factchecking is being creatively adopted by dictators. The assumption behind factchecking is that experts use facts to expose false information. However, an authoritarian government using the same technique to do the reverse demonstrates that this assumption does not hold. This malign adoption of one of the key journalistic tools used to fight lies shows that knowing the truth about political events does not automatically make one more convincing. To account for this challenge, factchecking must evolve.
The past two decades have seen a surge in the factchecking movement. The number of factchecking websites grew from a mere 11 in 2008 to 417 in 2023, making factchecking a global movement. Following the success of such projects as the US site PolitiFact and the UK site Full Fact, independent organisations are now debunking dubious political claims in more than 100 countries and in 69 languages. After succeeding in western democracies, the idea was quickly adopted in other parts of the world. The Ukrainian StopFake, Russia’s Provereno Media and many other organisations rely on the factchecking format to debunk Russian propaganda.
Factchecking corrections make people less likely to believe in misinformation in domains ranging from health to politics. Perhaps this effectiveness led many authoritarian leaders across the world to adopt the same strategy. Today, government-controlled factchecking websites help dictators to discredit criticism and justify repressive legislations across south-east Asia and China.
Perhaps the most blatant example of this trend is Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The Kremlin’s version of factchecking has become a prominent propaganda tool since the invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin created a massive industry relying on the elements of factchecking to debunk any accusations against Russia, ranging from TV shows on Channel 1, Russia 24 and RT to the War on Fakes website and network of Telegram channels. Learning from the factchecking movement, this industry has become Russia’s new line of defence against any criticism of the war or authoritarian government.
Recently, my colleague Margarita Zavadskaya and I designed an experiment to understand the effects of such debunking in Russia. We asked some Russians to evaluate news stories about the destruction in Ukraine from both state and independent media. Others evaluated the same stories, but after seeing factchecks from either independent media or the Kremlin’s “factchecking” organisations debunking the original news as fake. This allowed us to examine how the format, whether pro-regime or independent factchecking, impacts people. We found that debunks of Kremlin claims were effective, making Kremlin propaganda appear less credible to participants. However, just as independent factchecking discredited propaganda claims, pro-regime “factchecking” undermined the credibility of independent reporting.
These results reveal a problematic assumption underlying factchecking, which assumes that experts can use facts to debunk false claims. However, if an authoritarian government can effectively use the same methodology to distort reality, this demonstrates that the truth about political events does not give one a unique persuasive advantage. It is not facts, but trust in the authority of factcheckers that gives factchecking its power. If there is trust in an authoritarian government, there will be trust in authoritarian “factchecking”.
In authoritarian countries like Russia and increasingly polarised western democracies, the identification of inaccurate information alone is not enough to combat disinformation and misinformation. The effectiveness of countering disinformation depends not only on what facts are communicated, but how they are communicated, suggesting that the road towards re-equipping factchecking to counter new threats might lie through integration with audience research and learning how to present the same facts to diverse audiences based on their political views, cultural backgrounds and locations.
An enormous amount of disinformation has already been produced by Russia following the invasion of Ukraine – and more will be spread around US, UK and European elections as an unprecedented number of voters head to the polls in 2024. A response is needed more than ever.
Maxim Alyukov is a political sociologist who is a Leverhulme early career research fellow at the University of Manchester
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