The collapse of trust in facts: making sense of verification on the internet - 360

Published on August 26, 2026

As AI and crowdsourced systems take on the job of fact checking, they promise speed but struggle to deliver trust and explainability. Until they can do all three, human verification still has a vital role to play.

Transparency is essential to building trust in fact-checking. Who gets to decide what is true, and what happens after that decision, are questions that need to be answered. Photo: Erik Mclean/Unsplash

As AI and crowdsourced systems take on the job of fact checking, they promise speed but struggle to deliver trust and explainability. Until they can do all three, human verification still has a vital role to play.

For society and democracy to function we used to depend on shared facts and a system of informed discussion and decision making. People are angry because they believe this system is failing them.