About Chequeado

Chequeado

Overview

Chequeado is a non-profit, non-partisan digital fact-checking outlet based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Founded in 2010, it was the first fact-checking initiative in Latin America, and it is regularly described as the first organisation of its kind in the southern hemisphere and the Global South, as well as one of the earliest fact-checking projects in the world. It operates in Spanish through its website, chequeado.com, and through social media platforms and messaging channels, reaching readers who encounter public claims far beyond a traditional news page.

Unlike a general-news newspaper, Chequeado does not exist primarily to break news. Its core product is verification: it takes statements that are already circulating in public life, tests them against evidence, and publishes an explanation of what the evidence shows. That work is combined with investigative and explanatory journalism, media-literacy education, data journalism, and technology development. In Argentina, a country with a long tradition of sharp political debate and a highly polarised media environment, that combination has made Chequeado a reference point for journalists, teachers, researchers, and readers who want a check that is independent of the government and the opposition alike.

Founding and Origins

Chequeado was created in 2010 by the Fundación La Voz Pública, the Public Voice Foundation, a non-profit foundation whose aim was to improve the quality of public discourse in Argentina. Reference listings name Julio Aranovich and José Alberto Bekinschtein among its founders. The project imported an idea that had already been tested in the United States by sites such as FactCheck.org, launched in 2003, but it adapted that idea to an Argentine and Latin American context in which no dedicated fact-checking newsroom yet existed.

The early project was small and financially fragile, and published accounts of its history describe a period in which its survival was in doubt. Journalists who had joined the young team argued that audience interest in the format justified building a more stable structure. A decisive step came in 2012, when Laura Zommer joined the organisation. Zommer, a journalist who had previously worked at the newspaper La Nación and who holds degrees in communication and law from the University of Buenos Aires, became its best-known leader. She served as executive and general director for more than a decade, built its funding and partnerships, and became the public face of fact-checking in the region. In more recent reporting on the Federal Network, Franco Piccato is quoted as Chequeado's executive director, reflecting a later leadership generation building on that founding period.

Mission and Editorial Principles

Chequeado describes its mission as contributing to the improvement of the quality of public debate in order to strengthen the democratic system. Its stated work includes the verification of public discourse, the fight against misinformation, the promotion of access to information and the opening of data, and the encouragement of critical thinking in society. A phrase closely associated with the organisation sums up that approach: it works to revalue the truth and to raise the cost of lying.

Non-partisanship is central to that mission, in practice as well as in principle. Chequeado's leaders have stressed that a fact-checker must not only be autonomous and non-partisan, but must also be seen to be so, which means checking leaders from all points of the political spectrum. That stance has inevitably drawn criticism from competing camps. In a widely quoted formulation from the organisation's early years, government supporters accused it of being opposition and opposition supporters accused it of being pro-government, a reaction its team presented as evidence that it had not come to make friends with any political side, but to build a community with its readers around the facts.

What Chequeado Checks

Chequeado verifies statements made by politicians, economists and business figures, opinion leaders, the media, and other institutions and public actors. Its subjects range from claims made in presidential speeches, congressional debates, and election campaigns to figures circulating in interviews, news coverage, and social media posts. It selects claims for their relevance, their public interest, and their potential impact, rather than attempting to check everything that is said in public.

Alongside checks of individual statements, the outlet publishes explainers that set a contested claim in its wider context, as well as data-driven stories that open up the underlying numbers for readers. During periods of fast-moving disinformation, its work extends to viral content circulating on social networks and messaging apps, where a false claim may reach large audiences without ever passing through a traditional newsroom. In each case, the aim is the same: to establish what can be verified, to show the evidence, and to leave readers better able to judge the next claim they encounter.

Methodology and Verification Process

Chequeado is known internationally for having a specific, teachable methodology, which it has shared in courses for journalists and in its guidance to newer fact-checking organisations in the region. Accounts of that methodology describe an eight-step process. It begins with choosing the statement to be analysed, and it includes consulting the person who made the statement, reviewing the official source for the data in question, and consulting alternative sources such as experts, universities, consultants, and non-governmental organisations. A further step, emphasised by its practitioners as especially important, is to put the data into context.

Only after that research does the team confirm, qualify, or grade the statement. Chequeado has used verdict labels to summarise its findings, a practice common to the international fact-checking movement, while the full article explains the evidence behind the verdict. The organisation is a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute, whose Code of Principles promotes standards of non-partisanship, transparency of sources, transparency of funding, and transparency of methodology among its signatories. Chequeado's emphasis on process, as much as on the final verdict, is a recurring theme in profiles of its work: getting the right result matters, but so does getting there through the right, reproducible process.

Programmes Beyond the Newsroom

Chequeado is organised around four main programmes. The Media programme is the newsroom itself, responsible for producing journalistic content in various formats. The Innovation programme works closely with the newsroom on audiovisual and data formats and develops technology, including artificial intelligence tools that help automate small parts of the verification workflow, while the actual fact-checking is always performed by humans. The Impact and New Initiatives area measures the organisation's impact, develops new projects, and coordinates work such as the Latin American fact-checking network.

The Education programme gives Chequeado a reach that most news outlets do not have. It runs media and information literacy initiatives for citizens and for the educational community, and data journalism and fact-checking training for journalists and communicators. Its staff have taught critical thinking and media literacy through fact-checking in secondary schools and universities around Argentina, and the programme has experimented with formats such as Desinformación Revelada, a travelling interactive exhibition that invites participants to detect disinformation inside short stories and to learn how to stop it circulating. Research linked to this work has examined how short training sessions can improve students' ability to spot checkable facts, reflecting an editorial belief that verification is a civic skill, not only a newsroom technique.

LatamChequea and International Collaboration

Chequeado's influence extends well beyond Argentina because it has deliberately helped to build fact-checking elsewhere. It leads LatamChequea, the regional network of fact-checking organisations that it created and has coordinated since 2014. The network brings fact-checkers across Latin America and the Caribbean together to share techniques, exchange information, and publish collaborative verifications of claims that cross borders. By mid-2025, Latam Chequea brought together 48 organisations from 21 countries, according to reporting by the LatAm Journalism Review.

That collaborative habit proved important during recent disinformation crises. LatamChequea members worked together against disinformation around the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of the wider international effort coordinated by the International Fact-Checking Network, and again around Russia's invasion of Ukraine. In June 2025, on the eve of the GlobalFact summit in Rio de Janeiro, the network issued a joint statement titled Sin verificación, gana la mentira, warning that fact-checkers faced a difficult combination of reduced international funding, the withdrawal of platform anti-disinformation initiatives, the growing use of artificial intelligence, and government measures that could affect freedom of expression. Zommer's role in creating LatamChequea was recognised in 2025, when the International Fact-Checking Network presented her with a service award for her contribution to the field.

Elections, Live Checking and Public Impact

Elections have always been a peak moment for Chequeado's work. Poynter's coverage of Argentina's 2015 presidential election described a newsroom raising its profile through intensified checking of the main candidates, a crowdfunding campaign, and recognition that included the Gabriel García Márquez Award for innovation. The checks published in that campaign illustrated the method in action: claims by leading candidates about hospitals and public employment were tested against the record and found to distort it, whoever had made them.

Chequeado also pioneered live fact-checking in Argentina, checking presidential speeches in real time from 2013 onward with the help of specialist volunteers assembled for each occasion. Live checking is demanding, because the team must verify claims at the speed of a speech while accepting a higher risk of error, and its practitioners have written openly about that preparation. Published evidence of impact includes public figures clarifying or abandoning incorrect claims after a check, journalists using its articles to question leaders, and citizens citing its work against repeated falsehoods. At the same time, research on its audience shows the limits of the format: readers do not always accept a verdict that cuts against their own political loyalties, a finding Chequeado and the researchers who study it treat as a reason to keep improving formats rather than as a reason to stop.

The Federal Network of Innovative Journalism

In January 2025, Chequeado launched the Federal Network of Innovative Journalism, known by its Spanish initials RPI, with support from the International Fund for Public Interest Media. The network was created to address a structural weakness of Argentine media: the country is vast, many communities lie far from major cities and news infrastructure, and financial and political pressures have weakened or closed independent local outlets, leaving some areas close to becoming news deserts.

The network brought together five local publishers operating in geographically isolated areas: ADNSUR in Chubut, Aire Digital in Santa Fe, Corrientes al Día in Corrientes, Ruido in Córdoba, and Todo Jujuy in Jujuy. Together, the members reach an audience of over six million people per month. They stay in daily contact to identify collaboration opportunities, work on investigations of national scope that no single small newsroom could sustain alone, and create content aimed at younger audiences and, where relevant, in native languages. As the network's lead and initiator, Chequeado trains its partners in identifying information gaps in underserved regions, filing public information requests, building local data repositories, and interpreting datasets, while members also share knowledge of investigative tactics, digital security, and artificial intelligence policies. Reporting on the network's first year credited it with more than 140 jointly produced pieces, including explainers, data-driven stories, fact-checks, visualisations, and federal investigations.

Funding, Transparency and Place in Argentine Media

As a non-profit organisation, Chequeado is financed through a diversified funding strategy rather than by a single owner, advertiser, or political sponsor. Its history includes reader crowdfunding campaigns and support from foundations and international programmes, alongside the public fundraising events that helped stabilise it in its early years. To protect its editorial independence, it adopted a policy of never accepting government funds and of keeping a public record of its sponsors and donors, so that readers can judge for themselves whether any interest might stand behind a check.

That model places Chequeado in a distinctive position within Argentine media. It is an online news organisation, listed among the country's digital-native outlets, but it competes on authority rather than on volume: larger general-news sites may publish far more stories, while Chequeado's value lies in being cited, republished, and argued with across the political spectrum. Buenos Aires hosted the global fact-checking community as early as 2016, when fact-checkers from 41 countries met in the city for the GlobalFact conference, preceded by a LatamChequea regional summit, a sign of how central the Argentine experiment had already become. More than a decade and a half after its founding, Chequeado remains the reference point against which fact-checking in Argentina, and in much of Latin America, is measured.