If 2026 were a newsreel, it would be hard to take a breath. The year has shaped up to be one of the most turbulent in a century, not because of any single catastrophe but because so many fires are burning at once. Climate change is no longer a distant warning; it is a lived reality, with rising temperatures and extreme droughts displacing communities, reshaping the line between habitable and uninhabitable land, and tightening pressure on food and water supplies. In Eastern Europe, the Russia-Ukraine war has settled into a grinding conflict with no clear end, exacting a toll in lives and exhaustion that no one can calculate with confidence. In the Middle East, US and Israeli strikes on Iran have added another layer of instability to an already volatile region, while the Strait of Hormuz—the narrow waterway through which a large share of the world’s oil moves—has become a chokepoint of anxiety. Disruptions there have raised alarms about crude supplies, and tension involving Saudi Arabia and the Houthi militia has made the sea lanes feel less like highways than battlefields. Even in the South Atlantic, Argentina has revived the long-simmering dispute over the Malvinas/Falkland Islands on the international stage, and Southeast Asia has not been spared: Thailand and Cambodia exchanged fire along their border in 2025. For ordinary people, these are not abstract headlines. They are higher prices at the pump, anxious conversations in every time zone, and the creeping sense that the old certainties of geography and diplomacy no longer offer much comfort. None of these events happened in isolation. Together, they form a portrait of a world on edge—a year when turbulence is no longer the exception but the environment.
But the dangers of 2026 are not only in the physical world. Alongside armed conflict and climate stress, another threat has been quietly gaining strength: the deliberate and accidental poisoning of public information. Digital technology has made it almost effortless for misleading content to leap across borders, inflame old hatreds, and harden divisions. A rumor that once might have stayed in a village can now circle the globe before the first fact-check is published. The World Economic Forum’s 2026 global risk assessment placed false and misleading information among the most serious short-term risks, alongside social polarization and geoeconomic confrontation. This is not a remote worry. In a global survey of experts, more than 80 percent said the disinformation crisis is already affecting political stability. Artificial intelligence has made the problem dramatically worse. Deepfake fraud cases have reportedly risen by 3,000 percent worldwide, and the same technology that can generate realistic images, voices, and videos is now being used to manufacture falsehoods at scale, sometimes impersonating trusted journalists and public officials. What is most troubling is how unprepared many institutions remain. While the machinery of deception accelerates, many governments and organizations still lack formal plans for responding to a disinformation emergency. Indonesia, like many countries, is living with this reality. According to the Ministry of Communication and Digital Affairs, social media platforms in Indonesia carried 16,999 hoaxes and disinformation issues between August 2018 and July 2026, and about 800,000 websites were identified as potentially spreading similar content. Behind every hoax is not just a statistic but a confused family member, a frightened voter, a community set against outsiders. Falsehoods are no longer just noise; they have become a structural feature of modern life, eating away at the trust that makes democracy and cooperation possible.
This was the context in which Indonesia’s national news agency, ANTARA, made a determined diplomatic move. At the annual meeting of the Organization of Asia-Pacific News Agencies (OANA) in Moscow, attended by 35 of its 41 member agencies, ANTARA pushed for a lasting working mechanism for cross-border news verification. The idea is simple but ambitious: if disinformation is increasingly generated and dispersed by artificial intelligence, then truth must move with equal speed, and with even greater coordination. ANTARA’s president director, Benny Siga Butarbutar, has argued that disinformation is no longer merely a media problem; it is an accelerator of broader global risks, feeding anxiety, polarizing societies, and undermining trust in institutions. If falsehoods can cross borders without restraint, his reasoning goes, accurate information must be able to cross borders even faster and in a more organized way. This conviction lies at the very core of what a national news agency is supposed to do. News agencies are built for speed and reliability; their purpose is to get verified facts to the public and to supply other media outlets with material they can depend on. In a world of instant rumors, those standards have become more valuable than ever. The OANA meeting was therefore not just another international conference. It was an attempt to build a practical infrastructure for trust—a way for countries with different political systems and interests to cooperate on the most basic level. The question at stake was not whether nations agree on everything, but whether they can agree that facts matter. In this way, a seemingly technical proposal about verification became something more: a defense of journalism itself.
The weight of that cooperation becomes clear when you consider what OANA actually represents. Its member countries account for roughly 4.74 billion people, more than half of the world’s population. Those countries include the great population centers of India, China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Russia, and Japan—states whose internal debates and foreign policies affect the entire planet. They also operate in some of the fastest-growing and most connected information markets on earth. Across OANA member countries, internet users are estimated at 3.2 billion to 3.3 billion, and social media identities number around 2.5 billion. Indonesia alone is home to about 230 million internet users, an extraordinary 331 million active mobile connections—many people carry more than one device—and an estimated 180 million social media identities. China has about 1.1 billion internet users, India is approaching one billion, and internet penetration in the Gulf states is essentially universal. These numbers are not just impressive; they explain why the battle over information matters so much. When a false story enters this ecosystem, it can travel through billions of feeds, screens, and conversations within hours. People increasingly depend on mobile devices and digital platforms for their news, and that dependence makes them vulnerable to narratives designed to inflame rather than inform. The same speed that makes falsehood dangerous can also make truth powerful, but only if the institutions responsible for truth are willing to cooperate. The scale of OANA offers an enormous opportunity: if accurate, verified information is shared just as efficiently, it has a real chance of reaching the same billions of people. The challenge is not simply to produce truthful content; it is to make it fast, visible, and credible enough to compete with content that has no respect for facts. That is not just a media challenge. It is one of the defining governance questions of the century.
What ANTARA is proposing, in effect, is that OANA change its character—from a platform where news agencies exchange dispatches into a broader regional information integrity network. That would involve practical commitments: cross-border verification, faster sharing of reliable updates, and closer coordination when false or misleading narratives surface. When a major story breaks or a political emergency erupts, member agencies could check each other’s reports, confirm sources, and push back against rumors before they solidify into accepted reality. Think of how rumors during a conflict can escalate violence, or how a manipulated image can turn a protest into a riot; a network of trusted agencies, working together, could provide an alternative timeline in which facts are established before panic takes hold. The goal is not to erase disagreement between countries. News agencies cannot solve geopolitics, and they should not pretend to replace diplomacy. Their role is narrower but no less essential: to make sure that when societies debate their differences, the debate is based on information that has been checked, attributed, and responsibly reported. In an information environment that is crowded, fragmented, and full of algorithmically amplified outrage, this kind of disciplined cooperation can give OANA a future as a trusted reference point. When conflicting narratives cross borders, national news agencies can become a kind of common ground—a place where journalists, media outlets, and citizens can agree, at minimum, on what is true and what is not. That may sound modest, but amid the noise of 2026, it could be transformative. It would turn the fight against disinformation into a shared profession rather than a lonely national struggle.
For national news agencies, this mission extends far beyond delivering headlines. They are, by definition, the voices of their nations—but in today’s world, a national voice can either reinforce borders or help bridge them. By participating in a cooperative verification network, agencies like ANTARA can help keep channels of communication open between countries that may be divided by politics, history, or geography. They can make information cooperation a practical form of peaceful diplomacy, one that works quietly, daily, behind the scenes, rather than through summits and declarations. There is a certain elegance to this idea: even when governments are at odds, journalists can still talk to journalists. Even when borders are tense, verifiable facts can still cross them. In an age of deepfakes, algorithmic manipulation, and deliberate confusion, the old-fashioned values of accountability and accuracy become radical acts of public service. The world may be more turbulent than it has been in a century, but the turbulence is not only military or climatic. It is also cognitive and emotional. People everywhere are trying to make sense of events that seem beyond their control. What they need, more than ever, is a steady hand and a clear signal. That is why OANA’s proposed step matters. It offers a way for nations to compete on the basis of facts rather than fictions, and to remind the world that honest information is not a luxury item. It is the foundation on which all other forms of trust—between people, institutions, and governments—must be rebuilt. If that foundation can be reinforced, then even the troubled year 2026 might leave behind something lasting: a habit of cooperation, a culture of verification, and a shared commitment to let the truth travel as freely and as quickly as the lies. That would be a victory not for any single agency or country, but for the public everywhere.