Defending fact-checking partnerships with platform companies: ‘We can't fight alone against disinformation’

Defending fact-checking partnerships with platform companies: ‘We can’t fight alone against disinformation’

Summary

This article examines how professional fact-checkers across Europe rhetorically justify their financial and operational entanglements with major platform companies like Meta, Alphabet, and ByteDance. Drawing on 12 qualitative interviews with fact-checkers from 12 European countries, Farkas and Bengtsson apply rhetorical apologia theory (Ware and Linkugel, 1973) to identify recurring justificatory strategies. They argue that fact-checkers deploy four modes of differentiation and three modes of transcendence to defend platform partnerships while acknowledging their risks, performing rhetorical boundary work that mirrors traditional journalism’s “wall” metaphors of autonomy. The defensive rhetoric, the authors contend, reflects both external legitimacy struggles and internal contestation over the normative foundations of an emergent epistemic institution.

Key Contributions

• First application of rhetorical apologia theory to fact-checkers’ defences of platform partnerships, complementing prior boundary-work scholarship.
• Develops a typology of four differentiation modes and three transcendence modes for analysing justificatory rhetoric.
• Foregrounds the underexamined European fact-checking landscape, which hosts more institutions than North America yet receives less scholarly attention.
• Extends Graves et al.’s work on internal fact-checker boundaries by analysing external boundaries vis-à-vis platforms and between different platform actors.
• Methodologically adapts apologia theory from one-off public defences to ongoing institutional relationships surfaced in interviews.

Methods

Twelve semi-structured interviews (avg. 71 minutes) with fact-checkers from 12 organisations across 12 European countries (Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden), conducted November 2023–March 2024. Interviews covered six themes including organisational structure, audience, societal role, editorial independence, challenges, and platform companies. Coding proceeded in four phases in NVivo: inductive theme identification, coding, theoretical application of the apologia framework, and grouping of quotes by rhetorical defence type. All interviewees and organisations were anonymised to mitigate harassment risks.

Findings

• Four modes of differentiation: (D1) from platform companies (asserting editorial independence); (D2) between platform companies (e.g., defending Meta ties while rejecting TikTok/ByteDance); (D3) within platform companies (well-intentioned employees vs. corporate motives); (D4) from the state (framing platform funding as less compromising than government funding).
• Three modes of transcendence: (T1) invoking a counterfactual worse reality without fact-checking; (T2) appealing to broad alliances needed to combat disinformation; (T3) framing collaboration as reform from within.
• All 12 organisations received funding from at least one major platform between 2021 and early 2024 — most commonly Meta (9), Alphabet (8), ByteDance (2), Twitter (2), Spotify (2).
• Fact-checkers report frequent accusations of censorship, bias, and collusion — especially from far-right actors — that cite platform funding as “evidence” of wrongdoing.
• Boundaries are inconsistent across the field: organisations disagree on whether TikTok or state funding are acceptable, signalling a still-emergent professional identity.

Connections

This paper sits naturally alongside other work on the contested infrastructure of fact-checking and platform-researcher relations: Cazzamatta2026-lo on fact-checking practice, and Schiffrin_undated-gi and Dierickx2026-tw on the institutional politics of countering disinformation. It connects directly to the broader literature on platform dependence and data-access regimes shaping epistemic institutions — see Rieder2026-pp, Rieder2025-ju, and Helmond2026-ll — and resonates with critical analyses of how platforms shape independent oversight, including Bak-Coleman2025-pm, Donovan2025-ws, and Starbird2025-jj on the political pressures facing disinformation researchers and fact-checkers.

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