Inside a crowded Moscow conference hall, the air hummed with a dozen languages and the quiet click of laptops and translation earpieces. Around the long tables and standing-room-only corners, more than two thousand fact-checkers from eighty countries had come together with a shared, urgent mission: to make sense of a world drowning in falsehoods. This was the fourth edition of the International Forum “Dialogue on Fakes,” a gathering that has grown, year after year, into one of the most consequential meetings for people who spend their professional lives separating fact from fiction. It was not a glamorous summit of world leaders, nor a protest rally. It was something quieter and, in many ways, more patient. Journalists shared techniques for tracing manipulated images. Researchers compared notes on coordinated disinformation campaigns. Political figures sat in the audience, sometimes listening, sometimes arguing, while experts from the Global South and East—alongside colleagues from a number of Western nations—tried to find common ground in the messy, exhausting work of verifying what is real. The setting mattered. Moscow, often framed in Western media as a source of misinformation, was hosting the conversation about how to combat it. That irony was not lost on many participants, but it also invited a deeper discussion: in a world where everyone accuses everyone else of lying, where does trust actually begin?
The forum’s title, “Dialogue on Fakes,” sounds almost simple, but the problem it addresses is anything but. Misinformation has evolved far beyond the kind of rumor mongering that has existed since people first exchanged stories around fires. Today, a realistic synthetic video can place a world leader somewhere they have never been, a manipulated audio clip can wreck an election, and a single anonymous post can travel around the planet faster than any correction could ever hope to follow. The fact-checkers who gathered in Moscow understood this, because they live it daily. They come from countries where rumor can trigger communal violence, from democracies where viral falsehoods distort public debate, and from media environments where entire news ecosystems have collapsed under the weight of click-driven sensationalism. At the forum, the conversations tended to avoid the easy binaries of West versus East, or good versus evil. Instead, participants focused on the mechanics of deception: how fake content is manufactured, how distribution algorithms amplify it, how social media platforms have become unwilling accomplices, and how ordinary citizens, tired and overwhelmed, often surrender to confusion and cynicism. There was a strong emphasis on media literacy and education, on building resilience in audiences rather than simply chasing and debunking each ugly rumor. One speaker after another repeated a similar refrain: fact-checking is not just about saying something is false. It is about explaining why it is false, how it was made false, and what can be done to prevent it from spreading in the first place.
The diversity in the room was striking. Political figures and seasoned policy experts sat next to young investigative journalists from nations rarely heard from in mainstream global media. There were representatives from across the Global South and East, including those who have long complained that the dominant international fact-checking and social media research communities are too heavily shaped by a handful of Western institutions. For them, the Moscow forum offered a rare platform to discuss the information challenges affecting their own regions on their own terms. Many spoke about the double burden they carry. On one hand, they must combat local misinformation—often dangerous, sometimes deadly, and frequently rooted in historical ethnic or religious tensions. On the other hand, they must contend with global media narratives that treat their countries as passive victims or threats, never as serious producers of knowledge and analysis. Western participants, including journalists and academics, acknowledged these frustrations. Some admitted that global fact-checking collaborations have not always been fair or inclusive. Others noted that when Western fact-checkers focus on the Global South, they sometimes miss the context that makes a rumor credible or an accusation powerful. The forum, in that sense, was not a lecture hall but a mirror: it forced everyone to examine their own assumptions about truth, objectivity, and who has the authority to decide what is real. It was also a reminder that misinformation is a structural crisis, not just a problem of bad actors. Journalists working under censorship, for example, face a completely different set of challenges than those working in chaotic media markets. A fact-checker in a country with no access to independent courts cannot solve the same social problems as a fact-checker in a stable democracy. But they share a vocabulary of verification, evidence, and accountability.
The discussions in Moscow were not always comfortable. In a hall full of fact-checkers, there is sure to be sharp disagreement about the role of governments in regulating speech. Some participants argued that the state must take a strong role in punishing those who deliberately spread dangerous lies, especially in times of war or public health emergencies. Others worried that government involvement, no matter how well-intentioned, can become a weapon for censorship and the suppression of legitimate dissent. This tension is at the heart of every modern information debate. But the tone of the dialogue was noticeably different from the shouting matches that often define online arguments. People listened. They asked questions. They offered examples from their own countries, not as proof of universal righteousness, but as case studies in complexity. There were sessions devoted to the challenges of artificial intelligence, and the quiet anxiety in the room was real. If a video can be generated with AI in seconds and distributed by bots before anyone has time to react, traditional fact-checking timelines may simply be too slow. Yet the mood never became hopeless. Time and again, participants returned to the core idea that the answer is not to give up, but to build networks strong enough to hold up even when the ground shifts. This is why gatherings like “Dialogue on Fakes” matter. They are not magic cures. They do not solve misinformation overnight. But they build relationships, trust, and common protocols that allow fact-checkers from very different backgrounds to call each other for help when a crisis erupts somewhere in the world. That kind of solidarity is invisible in the public eye, but it is arguably more valuable than any single debunk or decal.
What made the gathering particularly special was its attempt to model the very thing it preached. The organizers emphasized that a dialogue cannot be real if only one side is allowed to speak, and so they built a program that made room for voices that are often excluded from global conversations about truth and media ethics. Participants from smaller nations, from non-English-language media, from countries with limited resources, all had opportunities to present their findings and to challenge the assumptions of bigger, wealthier organizations. There was an honest recognition that the fight against misinformation cannot be won by a few privileged platforms or by the editors of a handful of prestigious newspapers. It has to be a distributed effort, involving millions of ordinary people who know how to check a source and ask a critical question. The forum’s closing sessions were heavy with this theme: civic responsibility. Fact-checkers can produce brilliant work, but if the audience lacks basic information literacy, the work will be swallowed by the very chaos it is trying to tame. So the recommendations that emerged in Moscow were not just technical. They called for changes in school curricula, in the way journalists cover elections, and in the way technology companies design their products. They called for more transparency from artificial intelligence developers and more protection for media workers who face harassment, threats, and worse. Above all, they called for humility. No one in that room, regardless of nationality or political belief, could claim to have solved the problem. Misinformation is a hydra, and cutting off one lie only seems to make two more appear. But there is a strange comfort in that shared failure. It brings people together, holding off the loneliness that so often accompanies the fact-checker’s profession.
As the forum came to an end, the sense of purpose, if not the sense of mystery, remained. The 2,000 fact-checkers who had filled the Moscow halls returned to their homes carrying new contacts, new tools, and new questions. The phrase “Dialogue on Fakes” might sound like a contradiction, since fakes are not supposed to be engaged with, but exposed and discarded. Yet the organizers appeared to understand something important. A fake does not thrive because it is clever. It thrives because it speaks to a real fear, a real grievance, or a real desire for order in a confusing world. To fight it, one must understand the human need behind it. That is why the forum was structured as a dialogue and not a tribunal. In the months ahead, the conversations that began in Moscow will ripple outward. Some will be published as papers; some will become joint investigations; some will remain quiet, occasional call and email exchanges between journalists who once argued good-naturedly about verification methods over lukewarm coffee. Marina Kortunova, reporting for Press TV from Moscow, captured that mood in her coverage: a gathering less about grandiose promises and more about honest, unglamorous work. It is work that happens in conflicting places, among people with different histories and unequal powers. But at least for a few days, in one city, they sat together in the same room and refused to let the world’s confusion become the final word. That may not solve misinformation. But it is a beginning—and beginnings, when rooted in dialogue, always carry a spark of possibility.