In 2025, Fundación Maldita.es continued its work to fight for information integrity and against disinformation through journalism, education, technology, research and policy action.

As part of its work to empower the European fact-checking community, Maldita’s CEO chairs the governance body of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN), contributing to efforts to strengthen the technical capacity and advocacy skills of smaller fact-checking organisations. In this spirit, Maldita.es has also led or contributed to several collaborative initiatives aimed at improving shared capacity and cross-border responses to disinformation. These included ATAFIMI, a project that brings together 11 fact-checking organisations from Europe and Latin America to identify, analyse, and counter cross-border disinformation campaigns, and SAFIMI, an EU-funded project in collaboration with national partners to protect the Georgian information space against external threats. Maldita.es has also participated in the development of EFCSN’s Prebunking at Scale (PAS). PAS is an AI-powered tool built together with more than 40 fact-checking organisations across Europe in an effort to create shared technological infrastructure to track and counter disinformation that travels across borders.

Moreover, to respond to the information needs of citizens, Maldita has maintained its daily fact-checking activity and provided special coverage around events that provoked spikes in disinformation. In 2025 some examples included the nationwide power outage affecting Spain and Portugal, the anti-migrant violence in Torre-Pacheco, the conflict in Israel-Iran, Palestine and Ukraine or  the regional elections in Extremadura. A key tool in this regard is Maldita’s AI-powered verification bot, a chat-based resource where citizens can send in suspected disinformation and receive fact-checking support. The bot received 32,000 inquiries in 2025 alone, offering a direct window into the narratives circulating among the public, including in private messaging app WhatsApp.

The daily work of Maldita.es’ monitoring and investigating teams provides insights into how disinformation harms emerge and spread across platforms. This monitoring helps identify patterns and narratives that often prompt further investigation. In 2025, an investigation uncovered 1,075 Facebook pages impersonating public transportation systems and promoting scams across over 700 cities worldwide while taking advantage of Meta’s ad systems to do so. The ads lured users with offers of free transportation cards and directed them to phishing sites designed to steal people’s personal and banking information. In a separate investigation, Maldita detected 49 Youtube channels spreading AI-generated videos of fake confrontations between European and Spanish politicians and found that many of these videos violated Youtube’s policies on unlabeled synthetic content, while fostering political polarization through disinformation. Finally, an investigation in partnership with AI Forensics found that climate disinformation videos on YouTube and TikTok linked to the Valencia flood, a natural disaster that occurred a year prior, remained available on the platforms and were being amplified by the recommender systems. These are examples of investigations that generate evidence that can alert relevant Signatories to potential policy breaches and monitor the meeting of their obligations under the Code. 

This body of evidence also points to the continued importance of professional fact-checking in the online information environment, a point Maldita.es’ work in 2025 consistently reinforced. A report on fact-checking and Community Notes on X found that fact-checkers are the third most frequently used global source when users propose notes, and that notes citing fact-checkers tend to become visible faster than notes based on other sources.

Finally, Maldita.es facilitates dialogue among experts and stakeholders working on disinformation. In 2025, this included organising the event “From Russia with Hoax”, which brought together academics, journalists, public authorities, and disinformation specialists to examine Kremlin disinformation strategies. Maldita.es also remained engaged with FIMI ISAC, a network of organisations working to protect democratic societies, institutions, and critical information infrastructures from foreign information manipulation and interference.

Fundación Maldita.es is a non-profit foundation based in Spain that works to strengthen information integrity and counter disinformation through journalism, education, technology, research, and policy. Our multidisciplinary approach combines evidence-based journalism and investigative methods with award-winning technology to support our education, research, and policy efforts. This work is strengthened by a broad international network of citizens, partners, and stakeholders. Our mission is to provide all actors affected—from legislators and digital platforms to journalists, citizens & educators— with tools, capacities, and evidence-based information to make informed decisions, and together, to foster a more resilient, accessible, and trustworthy media & information ecosystem.