In an age where information travels at the speed of a click, the battle against misinformation has become one of the defining challenges of our time. Social media platforms, once celebrated for connecting humanity, now find themselves under intense scrutiny for their role in spreading falsehoods, especially during elections. Out of this crisis emerged a seemingly elegant solution: crowdsourced fact-checking. The idea was simple and appealing—instead of relying on a small team of professional fact-checkers, let the users themselves flag misleading content and add context. Elon Musk’s X platform, formerly known as Twitter, embraced this concept with its “Community Notes”…

Late April in Tbilisi began like so many other mornings, with the usual hum of traffic, the smell of fresh bread from old bakeries, and people scrolling through their phones as they rode the metro to work. For Dito Chubinidze, a journalist with the Georgian newspaper Asaval-Dasavali, that ordinary rhythm came to a sudden and brutal end. He was detained by state authorities, and the news was delivered not in a courtroom, but in a briefing room at the Prosecutor General’s Office, where officials pronounced two of the heaviest words in any language: treason and sabotage. A journalist, a man…