that some fact checkers have reached out to local business communities to obtain funding. There is a small group of fact-checking organizations that are operated by or affiliated with universities. For example, Masato Kajimoto spoke about Annie Lab, a fact-checking There is a small group program that operates at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre at HKU in of fact-checking collaboration with the Asian Network organizations that are of News and Information Educators operated by or affiliated (ANNIE). Annie Lab was established in with universities. 2019, and operates with the support of students, faculty, and former journalists (interview, 2021). On a similar note, in South Korea, the Seoul National University (SNU) runs SNU Fact Check as a joint fact-checking project with twentyseven major media outlets in the country. According to Yvonne Chua, a fact-checking initiative focusing on presidential, vice-presidential, and senatorial candidates beyond the official debates in the 2016 elections was carried out by journalism students of the University of the Philippines for the non-profit media organization VERA Files, which Yvonne Chua cofounded. In 2019, the university started the country’s first collaborative fact-checking initiative, which brought together three universities and eleven newsrooms nationwide to monitor the mid-term elections (interview, 2021). THE IMPORTANCE OF COLLABORATION AND PARTNERSHIPS Fact checkers, journalists, and even civil society organizations rely on collaboration and partnerships with governments and with other organizations working on information disorder in their own countries and around the world (Graves and Cherubini 2016). Such partnerships assist them in setting up operations, gaining the skills and expertise needed to do fact checking, learning about tools and techniques available for fact checking, and understanding the funding landscape that they have to navigate in order to sustain their operations. Collaboration also helps fact checkers to improve their work through learning from others and through obtaining support when a language barrier or lack of access to sophisticated tools hinders them from doing their work. For example, Duman Smaqov and his organization were able to help initiatives in other countries in Central Asia, including in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, by virtue of the skills and knowledge they have gathered through the process of setting up a fact-checking organization in Kazakhstan (interview, 2021). I N FO R M ATI O N D I SO R D ER IN THE GLOBA L SOUTH Asel Sooronbaeva spoke of the importance of regional cooperation and support for her team’s work. They have worked with partners from Ukraine, Moldova, and the UK, who have helped them with training of journalists. Currently their network includes organizations in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. She also referred to their partnership with Bellingcat (a Netherlands-based investigative journalism website that specializes in fact checking and open-source intelligence), which assisted them in terms of the tools and techniques they use in the fact-checking process (interview, 2021). Jean-Jacques Sahel, Asia-Pacific information policy lead at Google, provided an example of the benefits received through organic collaboration and partnerships when fact checking was starting out in Taiwan: I think it’s just lots of different willing people that came together. But one of the things that happened is that they [a group of collaborators that Google worked with in Taiwan] created the fact-check center. They were lucky that there was, at the University of Taipei, an association for quality journalism that [had] brought together already academics and journalists, before they started worrying about misinformation. So that provided already a nexus, a place for them to come together, and effectively that provided a backbone for the Taiwan fact-check center to be born. (interview, 2021) Abohon Sultonnazarov stressed the importance of the skills possessed by journalists and fact checkers, and spoke of how partnerships have helped the Institute of War and Peace Reporting with skills development. The institute had to rely on journalists from other countries (Ukraine, Georgia, Russia, and the USA) to bring in practical and theoretical knowledge on the topic (interview, 2021). Ujjwal Acharya and Umesh Shrestha noted that Nepal Fact Check benefits from its collaboration with the Center for Media Research, as these two organizations co-publish one of the most popular blogs in Nepal.4 Fact checks are published on the blog, creating more visibility and leading to more visits to the website (interview, Umesh Shrestha, 2021). Nepal Fact Check has also observed that mainstream media use their fact checks to correct false information previously broadcast through mainstream channels, a process that happens without any formal agreement between the parties involved: “The media correct disinformation and Asia – 2 0 5