And the final speaker in this final session at the 2026 Association of Internet Researchers conference in Mexico City is Darsana Vijay, whose focus is the crisis in Indian fact-checking. Misinformation in India is a pressing societal issue; this has been highlighted especially in the context of the wide circulation of mis- and disinformation on WhatsApp, and its effects especially in rural areas with low digital literacies.
Such misinformation thus especially affects marginalised communities, especially also Muslims in India; this is a product of the increasingly Hindu-nationalist orientation of the ruling BJP party under Narendra Modi. Social media platforms have failed to intervene against such mis- and disinformation, in part also to maintain good relationships with the Indian government.
There are a number of Indian fact-checking organisations that seek to push back against such mis- and disinformation, however; India has the largest number of such organisations which are member of the International Fact-Checking Network. Meta and Google support for such organisations is limited; they outsourced moderation to human fact-checkers largely as a PR fix and so they could push any allegations of bias on to those organisations; since 2025, they have increasingly abandoned collaborations with such third-party fact-checking organisations as these relationships became too ‘political’ in US and international contexts.
Fact-checking organisations in India first emerged around 2014, and grew in number in the late 2010s; they put increasing focus also on political accountability, placing them in some degree of conflict with prominent political organisations. Platforms gradually began to engage with these organisations as third-party fact-checking providers, especially after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and this became an important source of income for such fact-checking organisations, but also increased their dependence on platform support.
Under such collaborative arrangements, fact-checking became standardised and templatised; fact-checks took on a standard format, used Meta’s third-party dashboard, and fact-checking organisations were required to be signatories to the IFCN. This also made fact-checking content increasingly generic and boring, however; organisations were no longer incentivised to build their own loyal audiences or innovate their debunking formats. Also, fact-checkers had not control over whether fact-checked content was actually removed from circulation on the platforms themselves.
Fact-checking in India is also compromised by the fact that many such organisations are related to mainstream news organisations, which themselves depend on positive relations with the dominant BJP government; it is also complicated by the multilingual nature of the Indian communicators environment. Grants available to fact-checking organisations were also increasingly limited in their scope; increasingly, such projects were required to build on the WhatsApp business platform.
This circumscribes the applicability and functionality of fact-checking, and establishes certain very limited standards fro fact-checking projects. Fact-checking organisations pivoted to work within these rules in order to remain viable, but often also tried to do something extra to expand beyond these narrow boundaries. Increasingly, AI tools also play a role in this, and some fact-checking organisations also sought AI innovation grants rather than dedicated fact-checking grants.
This situation requires fact-checkers to navigate a complex and shifting environment, and what results from this is not necessarily suited for addressing the key issues which are at the centre of mis- and disinformation in India. Fact-checkers may have been pushed to address problems which are orthogonal to the actual situation in India.
