Most people probably do not know who Angie Drobnic Holan is, but they should. Holan is the director of the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter, and on April 2, or International Fact-Checking Day, she wrote an op-ed bemoaning the setbacks the industry has taken in 2025 from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and the Trump Administration.
The entire column displayed a tragic lack of self-awareness on how the industry has failed to learn from its mistakes and the problems stemming from its overinflated view of its importance. Holan writes, “But this year’s fact-checking day also marks a very serious moment for the fact-checking community. We are facing multiple challenges to our ability to do our journalism, and it’s not clear what the next few years will bring. As director of the International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter, which connects 170 organizations around the world all adhering to high standards in fact-checking, I see a community under intense pressure. Not everyone loves fact-checking, and there are powerful political forces that would simply like it to go away.”
Holan thinks people are opposed to factual accuracy when they’re simply opposed to partisan spin pretending to be fact-checks. Nevertheless, Holan claimed that without them, the world would just dissolve into chaos where relativity replaces truth:
This is indeed a crisis for fact-checkers, but it’s even worse for the general public. Disinformation hurts people. It has real-world consequences. Without fact-checking, more grandparents will fall victim to financial scams. Adults will refuse to vaccinate children against proven killers like measles. Teens will read faked reports of current events with no way to tell them apart from the real thing.
Does Holan really think that the industry has prevented those things? Conspiracy theories arise because of a lack of trust in “official” sources, and, whether Holan likes it or not, some people are going to say to themselves, “If they lie about how many genders there are, they must also be lying about vaccines.” 
Still, Holan goes on, “Two heavy blows hit fact-checking in 2025. In January, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg announced his decision to end its third-party fact-checking in the United States. The program paid fact-checkers to help Meta identify and flag hoaxes and other false information on its platform; the program’s end means less money for fact-checkers and less distribution via one of the world’s largest social media companies.“
She further lamented, “The other blow came from President Donald Trump’s administration, when billionaire Elon Musk pointed his Department of Government Efficiency at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The abrupt ending of USAID meant an immediate end to funding independent international journalism, which included support for fact-checkers in Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America and Asia. Some of these fact-checkers have suffered quietly, trying to find other ways to fund their work.”
Later, Holan continued to show no self-awareness, “Fact-checking’s effectiveness, in fact, may be why it is under such harsh attack in 2025. Fact-checking holds the line on reality for history’s sake. It builds evidence-based records that can withstand political pressures. Politicians who want to create their own realities are fighting hard against fact-checking, and they’re strong-arming tech companies and social media platforms into helping them.”
It doesn’t. On everything from naval strategy to vice presidential debates, fact-checkers have said things that are straight-up not true, but the fact-checkers got used to their power to be able to throttle social media posts for things they said were untrue, but Holan was eager to pretend that didn’t happen, “Politicians have led the charge that fact-checking is ‘censorship,’ but that self-serving argument is fundamentally a mischaracterization of what fact-checkers do. We’re more like nutrition labels for online content. Nobody thinks a nutrition label on a bag of potato chips or a gallon of milk is censorship.”
In the real world, when a Republican calls a Democrat a communist, they get such a label, but when a Democrat calls a Republican a Jim Crow throwback, they don’t. Sometimes, fact-checkers don’t even agree with each other. Everyone should agree that a democratic society should operate in factual reality, but people who appoint themselves the final arbiter of what is true should be a little humbler and more consistent in how they adjudicate controversial claims.
