Infrastructures of Truth: Fact-Checking Between Local Adaptation and Global Coordination

• Applicant: Dr. Laurens Lauer, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Communication Sciences ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 572397168

This project aims to deepen our understanding of how fact-checking initiatives are organized across the world, what societal conditions shape their development, and how these organizations engage in cross-border collaboration and community-building. In recent years, fact-checking initiatives have emerged as a new kind of public actor responding to the challenges of disinformation, manipulation, and declining trust in public communication. Active in more than 120 countries, they differ substantially in structure, purpose, and approach—ranging from journalistic and civic to educational orientations. The project pursues three main objectives: First, it will develop a systematic typology of fact-checking initiatives to identify core organizational profiles across the global landscape. Second, it will examine how national media-political environments—such as press freedom, political polarization, or levels of journalistic professionalism—influence the emergence of specific organizational types. Third, it will explore how these organizational profiles affect initiatives’ involvement in transnational networks and emerging professional communities. Methodologically, the project combines extensive empirical data collection with quantitative typology-building, comparative multi-level analysis, and social network analysis. In doing so, it will shed light on the structural diversity of fact-checking initiatives and reveal how different organizational models take shape in various contexts and gain traction on the international stage. The project contributes to our understanding of democratic resilience in a transforming digital public sphere.

• DFG Programme: Fellowship
• International Connection: Switzerland
• Host: Professor Dr. Per Block