president of VERA Files in the Philippines, noted that the issue of foreign funding has been used to undermine the credibility of fact checkers. The organization has been accused of having ties to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the USA, as they receive funds from the NED: One of the accusations is that we are foreign funded. When I was being interviewed on radio, the question was, “Are you funded by the NED?” It’s a yes or no question. If I said yes, they would say: “See, Ellen Tordesillas admits they are foreign funded.” So we had to come out with a statement and information on foreign funding. We said that our funders do not dictate to us what to fact check. And I said we were the ones who applied for the NED grant; the NED did not come and get us. A columnist once asked me: “Do you know that the NED is CIA?” I said, “No, I haven’t met [anyone from the] CIA in all these years we’ve been dealing with the NED.” (interview, 2021) Funders themselves are aware of the problems associated with maintaining credibility. JeanJacques Sahel recommended that fact-checking initiatives try to source multiple donors rather than relying on one or two donors: “I think it could be helpful if you have a collective, [so that there are] several donors. For example, you might have a collaboration between a reputable local organization, like a UN or an ADB or something like that, and the internet companies. So we avoid [a situation where] the scheme [is seen as being] overly influenced by one specific donor.” He also added that Google funds projects rather than organizations, to reduce the credibility risks and the perception of dependency (interview, 2021). Credibility issues are one of the reasons behind the difficulties faced by fact-checking and civil society organizations in obtaining long-term funding to cover their operations. Raisa Wickrematunge pointed out the ramifications of this situation: “It’s hard to plan ahead and to [say that] we’re going to try to expand by bringing on board more fact checkers, so that we can do this in a more sustained way” (interview, 2021). I N FO R M ATI O N D I SO R D ER IN THE GLOBA L SOUTH 4.4 CHALLENGES RELATED TO THE FACT-CHECKING PROCESS There are many challenges inherent in the process of fact checking (Dias and Sippitt 2020). Factchecking organizations face obstacles in obtaining sources and information due to a lack of sources and fact-checking tools in local languages. They are also constrained by restrictions on access to information imposed by governments. In addition, there are certain types of information that are more difficult to verify. And it must be acknowledged that fact checkers face significant stress and pressure in the course of their work. ACCESS TO SOURCES AND INFORMATION In the context of Asia, access to information and sources is one of the biggest challenges. This problem has multiple facets (Haque et al. 2018). Firstly, certain tools and techniques, such as searching for images on Google and using internet databases, might not be available or useful due to language barriers. Injina Panthi spoke of difficulties in obtaining information when the query is in Nepalese: “Even technology cannot help us to fact check. Most of the time, if we have to search for something that is [related to] Nepal and in the Nepali language, we cannot find [it through] Google. So those kinds of tools and techniques are not useful for us. That is the biggest limitation that we are facing right now” (interview, 2021). Fact checkers and journalists in many countries of the region face issues in accessing reliable information in some local languages. They also do not have the human resources to fact check in many different languages and dialects. This is a challenge, as mis- or disinformation tends to move not only from one platform to another but also across different geographical regions and languages (Haque et al. 2018; Vashisth 2020). Panthi noted that South Asia Check has had to give up on fact checking certain articles on social media that were written in Arabic and propagating hate speech, as they lacked the language capabilities and faced problems in verifying and authenticating the information and the photos (interview, 2021). A similar sentiment was shared by Gehan Gunatilleke, a lawyer in Sri Lanka: I do think that some of the more problematic Islamist content that you might get on social media, originating both from outside Sri Lanka Asia – 2 27