Award-winning author and counterdisinformation expert Nina Jankowicz will be a keynote speaker at the annual GlobalFact conference, held June 17-19 in Vilnius, Lithuania. Also joining the conference will be Jane Lytvynenko, an NBC News investigative journalist who reports on the Russia-Ukraine war, and Peter Erdelyi, an expert on media business models and financial sustainability.
The International Fact-Checking Network at Poynter hosts the annual conference.  This year’s conference will take place in conjunction with the International Investigative Journalism Festival, organized by the Lithuanian National Radio and Television (LRT) in partnership with the Lithuanian Journalism Center. Other conference partners include Delfi and the European Fact-Checking Standards Network.
Nina Jankowicz is a leading expert on disinformation and its role in international relations; Time magazine recently named her one of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. Her books include “How to Lose the Information War” and “How to be a Woman Online.” She is the co-founder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project, dedicated to ensuring citizens can find trustworthy information when it matters most.
Jane Lytvynenko is an award-winning journalist covering technology, conflict and information manipulation. Her work focuses on Russia’s war against Ukraine — a conflict of deep personal significance to Lytvynenko, who was born in Kyiv. She works for NBC News and has also worked at the Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed. She regularly trains journalists in how to conduct online investigations, offering in-depth training on OSINT (open source intelligence) techniques and how to report via encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram.
Peter Erdelyi is the founding director of the Center for Sustainable Media based in Budapest and writes its popular “Media Finance Monitor” newsletter. His research includes all aspects of media finance, including audience-based revenues, grant funding, strategic planning and commercial projects. Over the past two decades, he has launched and run various digital outlets and served on the executive board of the European Digital Media Observatory.
GlobalFact 2026 will feature more than 50 sessions, with programming that reflects the urgent challenges facing fact-checkers worldwide. Sessions will address the growing role of artificial intelligence — both as a tool for fact-checkers and as a new vector for disinformation — including dedicated programming on AI-generated content, the “answer economy,” and how AI models handle politically contested information. Other programming examines financial sustainability for news organizations and fact-checking outlets in an era of shrinking revenues and shifting platforms.
Other sessions will explore disinformation as it plays out across specific contexts: the Russia-Ukraine war, the U.S. information environment, government-sponsored information strategy in Argentina, censorship and resistance in Iran, and health and science misinformation in a post-pandemic world. The program features dedicated sessions on financial fraud and scams, climate misinformation, narrative tracking, and fact-checking under restricted media systems.
Workshops and hands-on sessions will offer practical training in media literacy for younger audiences, OSINT techniques, emergency planning, and AI tools for building newsroom technology. The conference will also include a showcase of short-form video work; a presentation from the EFCSN turning fact-checking into sustainable information infrastructure; and an IFCN town hall.Â
Regional sessions will bring together fact-checkers from Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, North America, and Africa and the Middle East. The conference will close with the GlobalFact Awards ceremony.
Media and Contact:
Angie Drobnic Holan
Director, International Fact-Checking Network
aholan@poynter.org
+1-727-410-1770
About the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter
The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) at Poynter was launched in 2015 to bring together the growing community of fact-checkers around the world and advocates of factual information in the global fight against misinformation.Â
We enable fact-checkers through networking, capacity building and collaboration. The IFCN promotes the excellence of fact-checking to the verified signatories to the IFCN Code of Principles — more than 140 organizations from 65 countries covering over 80 languages — through advocacy, training and global events.Â
Our team monitors trends in the fact-checking field to offer resources to fact-checkers, contribute to public discourse and provide support for new projects and initiatives that advance accountability in journalism. In 2021, the IFCN was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. Learn more at poynter.org/ifcn.
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The Poynter Institute is a global nonprofit working to address society’s most pressing issues by teaching journalists and journalism, covering the media and the complexities facing the industry, convening and community building, improving the capacity and sustainability of news organizations and fostering trust and reliability of information. The Institute is a gold standard in journalistic excellence and dedicated to the preservation and advancement of press freedom in democracies worldwide. Through Poynter, journalists, newsrooms, businesses, big tech corporations and citizens convene to find solutions that promote trust and transparency in news and stoke meaningful public discourse. The world’s top journalists and emerging media leaders rely on the Institute to learn new skills, adopt best practices, better serve audiences, scale operations and improve the quality of the universally shared information ecosystem.
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