“Let’s Check it Seriously”: Localizing Fact-Checking Practice in China

Abstract

This study explores emerging fact-checking service in China and how it operates in China’s context. News articles from Fact Check, the first fact-checker in China, are analyzed in comparison with PolitiFact in the United States (N = 379). Results show that fact-checking in China, in its start-up phase, pursues a weakened form, concentrates on health issues, and avoids discussion of hardcore public issues such as political, economic, and other current affairs. Despite journalists and various specialists making efforts on fact-checking items, it exposes the inadequate, fragmented even distorted journalistic culture in China’s fact-checking practice. Further studies can employ qualitative approaches to get insights into how fact-checking practitioners perceive this news genre in authoritarian China at a mesolevel.