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Elections have been a constant focus for our AI tools since we first built them. Wherever the vote, the job is the same: to ensure our tools handle the scale of media monitoring, freeing fact checkers to focus on the calls only a person can make.
Over the past decade that's held true from national elections across Africa to numerous elections here in the UK and referendums in Australia; and 2026 has been no exception.
A global track record
Across Africa, our tools have now been tested in elections in South Africa, Nigeria, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Senegal and beyond.
In 2024 alone, 45 fact checking organisations in 26 countries used Full Fact AI, supporting fact checkers monitoring 12 national elections that year.
Whether it was Ghanaian fact checkers catching 12 repeats of the same false claim across radio, YouTube and Twitter, or Africa Check using live transcription to move straight from a manifesto launch to a fact check, the pattern has held everywhere. Full Fact AI does the watching and listening at scale, so fact checkers can spend their time on the judgement calls that require human expertise.
The 2026 UK local elections
We saw the same pattern play out closer to home this year.
Alongside our usual monitoring across broadcast, print and social media, we ran a WhatsApp tipline so readers could send us claims from leaflets and posters that might otherwise have gone unseen.
That combination of automated monitoring, reader tips and our teams’ expertise helped them identify a viral video wrongly shared as the Green Party celebrating an election win in a foreign language, and a wider pattern of misleading bar charts on party leaflets, which we were then able to check against the real results once polling closed.
What's next: US midterms
The same approach, pairing AI-powered monitoring with a fact checker's judgement, is now heading across the Atlantic.
This year we're extending our social media monitoring tools to International Fact-Checking Network fact checkers in the US ahead of the midterm elections, giving teams like PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and others the same kind of support that's helped fact checkers track claims elsewhere in the world.
Our tools will monitor all of the Republican and Democratic party candidates in the House, Senate and gubernatorial races across their X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube accounts, as well as the main independent candidates.
Anything they publish on these social media channels will be captured, meaning fact checkers will be able to set keyword alerts, search across all the text and video content, and be notified when candidates repeat claims which have previously been debunked.
It gives anyone using our tools the ability to monitor elections at scale in a fast-moving multimedia environment.
So, with all this in mind, if you're an IFCN signatory in North America who would like access to our tools to support your fact checking of the midterms, we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch with Kate Wilkinson: kate.wilkinson@fullfact.org.