PolitiFact

PolitiFact is a fact-checking website. By its own account it was created in 2007 by the Tampa Bay Times, a Florida newspaper, and was acquired in 2018 by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school. It describes itself as “a nonpartisan fact-checking website to sort out the truth in American politics.”

Truth-O-Meter Methodology

PolitiFact publishes its rating procedure. The Truth-O-Meter carries six ratings in decreasing order of truthfulness — True, Mostly True, Half True, Mostly False, False and Pants on Fire, the last defined as a statement that “is not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim.” The site states that the burden of proof rests on the speaker and that statements are rated on the information known when the statement was made.

Ratings are not assigned by a single reporter. The reporter proposes a rating; an assigning editor reviews it with them; the assigning editor then brings the fact-check to two further editors, and the three editors vote, with two votes carrying the decision. PolitiFact also runs a Flip-O-Meter, which it describes as rating an official’s consistency on an issue rather than making a value judgment about changing position.

Funding and Disclosure

PolitiFact publishes a standing funding-disclosure page. It states that revenue comes from on-site advertising and from selling its content to media publishers and companies, and that organizations contributing more than 5 percent of total revenues in the previous calendar year are listed by name; as of the February 2025 update, those were Meta and TikTok.

The site also runs a reader membership programme, the Truth Squad, launched in 2017. It reported $483,337 in individual Truth Squad donations from 5,277 members in 2024, and it names every donor giving more than$1,000. It states that it does not accept donations from anonymous sources, political parties, elected officials or candidates, that donors have no say in ratings, and that donors are not given the right to review or edit content.

Sourcing Note

Several claims from the previous version of this page are removed as unsourceable against the pages cited here: the reach line “millions of monthly readers with syndication across local news partners”; the account of a 2009 Pulitzer Prize prompting expansion into state-level franchises; the description of a “small investigative team” at launch; the claims about supplying structured data feeds to Google and YouTube pipelines; and a section on COVID-19 rapid-response teams and Spanish-language explainers. The fact-checks-for connection to Facebook was also removed: PolitiFact’s own disclosure page describes Meta as a source of revenue and does not describe a current fact-checking partnership.