We look ahead to Full Fact’s priorities in 2026, which is a year of Scottish and Welsh parliament elections and local elections in England.
Full Fact will focus intensely on fact checking with an aim to maintain public trust in election integrity so that voters can ask the right questions, understand narrative context, and make informed democratic choices.
For example, in 2025, we fact checked dozens of videos making outlandish claims about new government policies, including time limits for sitting on park benches, caps on the number of flights, and monitoring of phone calls. Despite being weapons-grade nonsense, similarly misleading videos we recently analysed were viewed more than 8.4 million times.
After Nicolás Maduro’s seizure by US forces on 3 January 2026, a slurry of misinformation has spread across social media platforms attracting millions of views.
Claims we have checked include repurposed video from Israel and AI-generated content of Westminster. Collectively this sort of misinformation can misrepresent the unfolding story and may erode trust in genuine verifiable information. For tips on how to verify content before you share it, read our toolkit.
Guest author Dorothy V M Bishop, Emeritus Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology University of Oxford takes a look at paper mills: organisations that sell authorship for fraudulent or low-value articles that are flooding journals and undermining trust in research integrity.
As a registered charity, Full Fact relies on the public to support our independent, impartial fact checking and advocacy work. Monthly donations help challenge harmful misinformation from politicians, in the media, and online.
Please support Full Fact with a monthly gift of £10
Conservative shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and shadow Northern Ireland secretary Alex Burghart claimed on LBC this week that unemployment has risen “in every single month” since Labour took office. This isn’t quite right.
Watch on YouTube
Watch on Facebook
