Here at Full Fact Towers we’re about to log off, don our Christmas jumpers and start prepping for a well-earned break. And as is traditional at this time of year, we’ve been taking a look back, reflecting on some of the changes our frontline fact checkers have seen in an action-packed 12 months.
Over the course of 2025, we’ve published over 750 fact checks and related pieces of content, covering everything from major political rows and alarming online misinformation to some frankly bizarre blunders (such as when BBC radio bulletins massively overstated Britain’s cocaine consumption).
So, what trends have we observed? What has our team of fact checkers spotted, scouring the media, social media and Hansard for claims each morning? What’s been different in the last year? And what might that tell us about the year to come?
We’ve been talking about the dangers of deepfakes, AI-generated imagery and other AI-assisted misinformation for a while—but we saw a step change in volume in 2025.
Without attempting to quantify this in any rigorous way, it’s fair to say that anecdotally at least, generative AI has gone from being a novelty in our fact checking to absolutely routine. In November 2024, we suspected AI was involved in four of the fact checks we published—in October this year, it was at least 27, not least because it’s often used in the flood of false claims we’ve seen about personal freedoms.
Takeaway: The Department of Justice (“DOJ”) continues to take customs fraud seriously. With the Department of Justice’s newly launched Trade Fraud Task Force, the government has signaled a zero-to...