Full Fact in 2023
Your support has led to a bumper year for calling out misinformation and holding those in positions of power to account.
2023 in numbers
- We wrote 776 fact checks, more than any previous year
- We secured 130 corrections from newspapers, broadcasters, MPs, ministers and even the Prime Minister
- Our work saw 2,300 appearances and mentions in the media
- 5.3 million users accessed our website
- Full Fact supporters took over 45,000 actions to push for systems change and demand honesty from our politicians
- Our AI tools monitored over 36 million sentences for potential claims to check, helping scale up our fact checking
- AI tools shared with fact checkers in nine different countries including DRC, Liberia and Nigeria.
- 4,103 individuals donated to Full Fact
- More than £56,000 raised through The Big Give match funding campaign
- 28 people attended our first supporter webinar
In 2023 we saw big change
In the summer we said farewell to our founding CEO Will Moy, and said hello to our new CEO Chris Morris. He hit the ground running by giving evidence in front of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, representing Full Fact at events and using his decades of broadcast experience to talk about our work in interviews and podcasts.
And—together with our supporters—we saw big wins
In the autumn our campaign to change the way corrections are made in Parliament saw a major victory, leading to a vote in Parliament following the mobilisation of over 50,000 supporters. The new system will allow MPs to make corrections to the official record, which members of the public will be able to view online in an easily accessible way.
Throughout the year our supporters have taken over 45,000 actions to improve honesty in politics, including writing to both the Prime Minister and Home Secretary asking them to correct false and misleading claims they made.
We’ve seen first hand how bad information spreads during an election. It can’t be allowed to erode trust and undermine democracy. Throughout the year our AI team have rolled out ground-breaking tools to support fact checkers monitoring elections in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Liberia.
A key mantra at Full Fact is that fact checking isn’t only about publishing fact checks. It’s about deliberately and methodically taking action to slow and stop the spread of bad information. This year we went further than just asking for corrections on false or misleading claims, for example we made a direct intervention with the Ministry of Justice to change the way they report statistics, and mobilised our supporters to write directly to their MPs or ministers to demand they correct the record.
Towards the end of the year we wrote a letter to all party leaders setting out our expectations for the general election. To date, three political parties have responded to us and pledged their agreement to our requests, and we will be announcing these in the New Year. In November we launched the first of our public campaigns around these election standards, with a petition calling for political parties to stop dressing up political leaflets as newspapers which more than 11,000 of you have already signed.
In preparation for the election we also launched a new politics live blog so that we can get good information out to everyone quickly and concisely.
We continued our work checking harmful content circulating online on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. In August we published a major investigation into hoax posts shared on buy/sell community groups on Facebook that were designed to spread fear and alarm, and in some cases lead to financial scams. We wrote directly to Meta and secured nationwide media coverage drawing attention to the issue.
We closed out the year by raising over £56,000 as part of the Big Give Christmas charity challenge with the support of our donors, more than doubling what we raised the previous year.
None of this would have happened without the small army of donors and supporters who turn our fact checking work into tangible change. From all of us here at Full Fact thank you. We look forward to what next year brings.