We, the staff at TruthOrFiction.com, are shutting down the site. It will remain live for the foreseeable future, but it will no longer be updated.
We are eternally grateful for our readers. You made us everything we were. We appreciate you and will never forget how you have supported us over the last five years. We will never forget how humbling it was to receive the outpouring of support from all of you. Your support, shares, and readership kept this work alive.
As much as we would like to focus solely on our gratitude for your support and love for the site, there’s more to discuss. It’s important, and to be candid, we have been dreading this conversation for a long, long time.
We have to leave you with a dire warning. We are not closing down voluntarily, or because we feel that our work is done. Quite the opposite — the shuttering of our site (and many others) is directly related to a years-long, sustained and well-funded attack on efforts to combat disinformation.
After the three of us left Snopes a few years ago, we realized we could make TruthOrFiction.com — which was already a venerable and established fact-checking site — into a new kind of fact-checking site, one that centers the people who are affected by disinformation campaigns and tries to offer tools to help them.
Since we signed on to this project in 2018, we believe we have fulfilled that promise to the best of our ability — despite escalating efforts by platforms, corporations and politicians to silence this work.
Before we look at how and why this happened, a question: When was the last time you encountered a fact check alongside disinformation in 2023? When was the last time you read one at all?
Visibility and visits are the lifeblood of digital publishing, and the absence of fact checks to an audience is the absence of sustaining revenue to a site or project; this is how efforts like ours are slowly starved into silence.
It’s not just counterdisinformation that is under attack. Related services and fields have been chronically starved away for decades and replaced with distortions and outright lies.
This year may have been the final blow for an entire constellation of information industries, with journalism at its heart — an attack that stretches at least back to the destruction of Gawker:
- That is the back story to a legal case that had already grabbed headlines: The wrestler Hulk Hogan sued Gawker Media for invasion of privacy after it published a sex tape, and a Florida jury recently awarded the wrestler, whose real name is Terry Gene Bollea, $140 million.
- What the jury — and the public — did not know was that Mr. Bollea had a secret benefactor paying about $10 million for the lawsuit: Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and one of the earliest investors in Facebook.
- A 2007 article published by Gawker’s Valleywag blog was headlined, “Peter Thiel is totally gay, people.” That and a series of articles about his friends and others that he said “ruined people’s lives for no reason” drove Mr. Thiel to mount a clandestine war against Gawker. He funded a team of lawyers to find and help “victims” of the company’s coverage mount cases against Gawker.
One need only look to what was once Twitter today to see the cesspool of ignorance and weaponized lies flourishing there, too — or to Facebook, where there has been absolutely no consequence for the multiple genocides that were sparked and nurtured there:
- For years, Facebook, now called Meta Platforms, pushed the narrative that it was a neutral platform in Myanmar that was misused by malicious people, and that despite its efforts to remove violent and hateful material, it unfortunately fell short. That narrative echoes its response to the role it has played in other conflicts around the world, whether the 2020 election in the U.S. or hate speech in India.
- But a new and comprehensive report by Amnesty International states that Facebook’s preferred narrative is false. The platform, Amnesty says, wasn’t merely a passive site with insufficient content moderation. Instead, Meta’s algorithms “proactively amplified and promoted content” on Facebook, which incited violent hatred against the Rohingya beginning as early as 2012.
- Despite years of warnings, Amnesty found, the company not only failed to remove violent hate speech and disinformation against the Rohingya, it actively spread and amplified it until it culminated in the 2017 massacre. The timing coincided with the rising popularity of Facebook in Myanmar, where for many people it served as their only connection to the online world. That effectively made Facebook the internet for a vast number of Myanmar’s population.
So what now? We no longer know the answers to these mounting questions, and we’ve done this for a living for years. It is an unforeseen irony of counterdisinformation, fact-checking, and debunking that the longer you do it, the less certain you become of the truth. Despite this, we are deeply proud of our work and the legacy that it leaves.
But we do know for certain that the current situation is not sustainable. We hope that this site, which will remain live but not updated, will provide a toolkit for readers hoping to fight current and future campaigns.
If you take away only one thing from this warning, let it be this: Dehumanizing disinformation exists exclusively and entirely to pave the way for dehumanizing policies, and in a world roiled by climate change, those who control information control everything else.
We have observed this throughout our work in counterdisinformation; the strongest opposition we faced was during our around-the-clock efforts to draw attention to rampant human rights violations at the border in June 2018 and onward.
Disinformation is designed to make you numb, to drain your energy, to wear you down and to trick you into concluding that truth is ever elusive, subjective in nature … and that “truth” usually has a tendency to arrange itself in a manner expedient to the wealthy and powerful.
Alongside the gloomy signals and headwinds we have faced and described, however, there is hope. Individuals committed to ensuring disinformation is identified and called out can and do intervene to conduct this work on a volunteer basis. If you have the ability and energy, please step in. Backup is not coming.
But we can do it ourselves, collectively. In 2023 alone, American workers engaged in labor action at an unprecedented level, with successful strikes occurring in sectors from retail to entertainment and beyond. In August 2023, Gallup determined that support for unions in the United States was at its highest level in decades — measuring at 67% approval for high-profile strikes among those polled.
This is a difficult juncture in the fight against disinformation and the abuses it enables — of workers, women, immigrants and humanity and the planet in general. But we cannot help but hope that as institutionalized counterdisinformation efforts wane — and they are clearly waning — everyday people will take up the fight, as they have so recently done with labor and other human rights causes increasingly in recent years.
For better or worse, it’s up to you now, but we think you’re up to taking the baton. We’ll help.
As much as we’re sad to mark an end to this project and worried about the future, we’re also hopeful that our years of steady debunking and community action have prepared readers to check the facts they want to see checked in the world.
We sincerely hope to return to fact-checking in some capacity in the future, but this is what we wanted to say now:
- Good luck
- Stay safe out there
- Double-check everything, primary sources whenever possible
- Information deserves to be free
- Never go with a conspiracy theorist to a second location
Thank you for everything.
Veteran journalists and editors Arturo Garcia and Brooke Binkowski live in San Diego while Kim LaCapria lives on Long Island, NewYork. A version of this essay originally appeared on TruthOrFiction.com.