TL:DR Notes on Creating a World where Facts Are Taken Seriously and Power the Dismantling of the Broligarchy.
Guest Op-Ed: Surabhi Srivastava
Editing support by Luckson Mulako Sikananu
In December last year, I watched a Netflix documentary celebrating the 100th anniversary of one of my favourite news and literary magazines, The New Yorker. It was overall a well-crafted and engaging behind-the-scenes look at the inner workings of the magazine. What I remember most vividly from the documentary was the insight it offered into the rigorous, time- and people resource-intensive, and well-established fact-checking process the magazine applies to every piece of content that gets published; including the famous (and seriously funny) The New Yorker cartoons.
I remember being awestruck by the magazine’s detailed and meticulous approach to fact-checking. This process has been institutionalised and religiously practiced for decades and continues to be embodied in the quality of journalism and writing that the magazine has produced, now for a century.
It is true that The New Yorker invests extensive resources in fact-checking. It has an entire fact-checking team (real people, not AI), and the review rounds, involving close collaboration between journalists, editors, and fact-checkers, are both arduous and intensive.
However, what the documentary also makes abundantly clear is that the magazine has always, and continues, to take facts seriously. Facts, and fact-checking, are treated as non-negotiables and fundamental to its journalism. A priority that demands intentional and sustained attention, as well as investment and allocation of time, money, people and expertise.
This was perhaps the most profound takeaway for me, and one that we must remind ourselves of often, not only as media and media development professionals, but also as citizens, and as people invested in enabling and promoting a democratic, inclusive, and an informed public discourse.
On this International Fact-Checking Day, observed every year on April 2nd, it, becomes even more urgent and necessary to reiterate that we must take facts seriously. This is particularly important if we are to counter and overcome an (online) information landscape, politics, and cultural dynamics that have subsumed and normalised the philosophy of “post-truth”, where feelings and personal beliefs are often given greater weight than facts in shaping public opinion and discourse.
Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against feelings and personal beliefs. I believe these can be important sources of insight, knowledge, and even wisdom, both as individuals and as a collective. I am also not interested in pitting feelings against facts, which I consider a lazy and ultimately a futile binary. It does little to help us make sense of the world around us and instead encourages rigid, black and white thinking that may lead to disengagement and inaction.
Rather, I believe that both facts and feelings are salient and relevant, provided we take both of these seriously — nurtured by attention, contextualisation, and awareness of their respective limitations in helping us to interpret and understand the world around us.
How did we get here?
This grave challenge that confronts us today is two-fold and interconnected.
First, as a society and a polity, we have become frighteningly accustomed to the idea that facts don’t matter anymore, at all! It is no longer about balancing facts with beliefs, but a shift towards a reality where feelings dominate and facts are treated as debatable or irrelevant. This is reflected in the overall decline in trust in media and other public institutions that were traditionally considered as arbiters of “truth”, the politicisation of fact-checking, the unsettling and gradual decrease in the number of fact-checking sites worldwide, particularly since 2023, and the complete dissolution of fact-checking programs by Big Tech, especially Meta and X. These factors have contributed to a growing concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a few, what has been termed as the “broligarchy ” (drawing from the popular slang term “tech bros”).
Mark Zuckerberg, has in fact, gone so far as to blame fact-checkers for being “too politically biased” and for “destroying more trust than they’ve created”. This overlooks the broader socio-political and technological context in which fact-checkers and fact-checking has operated in the last few years, coupled with the consistent and blatant demonisation of facts that has culminated into these devastating and partisan policies – which are only a piece of the broader and intentional right-wing led political project, within the United States and beyond. The result is not only public confusion, but also reduced investment in fact-checking across media organisations.
The second strands of this challenge is the rapid rise of AI-generated and AI-driven disinformation and manipulation of facts. What makes this distinct is the scale, ease, and speed with which such content can now be generated and disseminated. Whether it is textual, image-based, or audio and visual content, the rapid evolution and ease of access to generative-AI tools has significantly lowered the barrier to producing content that is detached from factual accuracy and instead designed to reinforce beliefs or provoke emotional reactions (think rage-baiting).
This is compounded by the changing ways in which people consume information. A growing number of users, particularly younger audiences, rely on AI tools to access, summarise, and even verify news. Yet these systems are themselves trained on an information ecosystem increasingly saturated with low-quality or non-factual content. A 2025 study found that leading AI chatbots produced false or non-factual claims in nearly 35 percent of cases, up from 18 percent the previous year.
While it is often argued that AI is neutral and depends on how it is used, this view is incomplete. The development and deployment of these technologies is a pivotal part of the broader political project that prioritises complete erasure of facts to hijack our attention and empathy to instead seed instability, paranoia, “otherisation”, and polarisation. They are shaped by concentrated economic and political interests that benefit the hands of a few (read: it’s the broligarchy, stupid!). In this context, the marginalisation of facts is not incidental, but aligned with a broader shift in power towards a small group of actors shaping the digital public sphere.
In summary: facts-driven people power = 0; broligarchy = 1.
Let’s talk solutions!
If you have made it this far in the essay, I admire your attention span, and perhaps owe you an apology for the rather grim conclusion. That said, I strongly believe that meaningful solutions require a clear understanding of the root causes. Iin this case, our information ecosystem, our public discourse and our democracies are strained because, as a society, we have stopped taking facts seriously as a society. If we accept this, we can begin to identify relevant and impactful solutions.
What could these look like?
If I go back to where I started from, with the example of The New Yorker magazine, what stands out is not simply its ability to invest significant time and resources in fact-checking, but rather, its underlying belief that journalism cannot survive without facts. Hence, fact-checking is not an afterthought, but the bedrock of doing good public interest journalism. The investment in people, time, and money follows from this philosophy.
At the societal level, this is the shift required: a renewed commitment to treating facts as foundational. We need to reshape our collective understanding and narrative about facts, reinforcing their relevance, salience, and their role in enabling an informed public and resilient democracies.
At the same time, these new narratives around facts must not shy away from also engaging with our feelings and beliefs, particularly if we are to challenge the binary thinking of facts vs. feelings. Both shape how we make sense of the world around us, how we process information, and translate knowledge into wisdom and action. This is especially vital for younger audiences, who must be equipped not only to assess evidence, but also to understand the emotional dynamics that influence how information is received and shared. This becomes even more pertinent and pressing as evolving AI technology not only re-wires our brains, but also increasingly how we process information and experience connection and empathy.
Finally, how we value and support fact-checkers must also shift if we are to take facts seriously. Yes, fact-checking is a specialised set of skills, however, it is also fundamentally imbued with the dogged idea of getting as close to the truth as possible, in public interest, and to not just counter, but also prevent the intentional pollution of the information ecosystem that results in doubt, confusion, and polarisation. Fact-checkers are therefore “essential workers”, who guard the frontlines of the information landscape in service of facts, integrity, and truth – foundations for any healthy and functioning democracy. Their work should not be easily dismantled by platforms or deprioritised by media organisations. Governments, funders, and media leaders must invest consistently and deliberately to ensure fact-checking remains a core function of any healthy information environment.
This is the approach we are advancing at RNW Media and RNTC Media Training Centre. We work with media-makers to strengthen their fact-checking and counter-disinformation skills, while also shaping a renewed perspective and narrative on the role of facts and fact-checking in journalism and public discourse. Through our approach and work on media literacy, we also support media consumers to engage critically with information, recognise the interplay between facts and emotions, and reclaim their agency, thus challenging, disputing, and dismantling the idea that the broligarchs should have a monopoly over facts and truth.
I will be honest – the project of taking facts seriously is hard work, and it is bound to be a multi-generational and long-term undertaking. This project requires constant reiteration and a reminder about why facts matter for our collective existence. It is indeed sustained work that requires ongoing commitment, investment, and reinforcement, often in resource-constrained environments. However, it is necessary work. It is how we build societies that are informed, that value empathy over outrage, and that sustain a shared understanding of the world.
In summary: facts-driven people power = 1; broligarchy = 0.