Public service fact-checking in controlled media spaces: a panoramic snapshot of Southeast Asia in 2025

The development of 21st-century fact-checking has gathered much scholarly interest over the last decade. Contributing to levelling this understanding beyond Western liberal media spaces, the paper provides a panoramic snapshot of the state of public service fact-checking in the controlled media spaces of Southeast Asia (SEA): 31 qualitative interviews were conducted with fact-checkers and media professionals after the January 2025 US government turnaround on then existing foreign development programmes and while two major US Big Tech sponsors were reviewing their commitments to fact-checking. What stands out upon characterising the regional fact-checking movement, is the standardly accounted-for magnitude of this—until then—predominantly US-Euro pro-democracy and corporate support. That the regional free press and digital rights activist space has acted as the birthplace of the regional fact-checking movement is however often overshadowed. This misproportion supports the tacit but flawed assumption that fact-checking in SEA is a copy of the US newsroom model of fact-checking. In turn, this assumption, firstly, eclipses the regional movement’s foundational interest in safeguarding collective memory alongside its interest in countering populist politics, secondly, befogs a movement piggybacked by corporate interests, thirdly, fails to account for a fact-checking culture not originally centred around data for building quantitative objective truth.