Full Fact — The UK Fact Checking Charity, and What Journalists Get From It

Full Fact is a fact checking organisation with two legal identities. Its own site states that Full Fact “is a registered charity (no. 1158683) and a non-profit company (no. 06975984) limited by guarantee and registered in England and Wales”. Both registrations are public: the charity appears on the Charity Commission register, and the company appears at Companies House.

The Charity Commission entry records the charitable activity in Full Fact's own words: “We provide free tools, advice, and information so that anyone can check the claims we hear about public issues.” That is the useful framing for a journalist. Full Fact is not built to serve newsrooms specifically — it is built to serve anyone assessing a public claim, and journalists are one group of users among many.

Beyond publishing fact checks, Full Fact's own account of its work includes pressing for corrections after a claim has been published, campaigning on policy, running training, and developing claim-detection software that other fact checking organisations license.

We are deliberately not giving you a founding year, because Full Fact's own material and the public registers do not line up neatly, and a profile page is not the place to resolve that with a guess.

What the site itself says is that Full Fact has “been on the front line of fact checking since 2010”, and its training material refers to sixteen years of work. What Companies House records is that the non-profit company, number 06975984, was incorporated on 29 July 2009. The current charity number, 1158683, was registered later still. Those are three different anchor points for the same organisation.

If you need a founding date for a piece of copy, attribute it rather than assert it — say what Full Fact says about itself, or cite the incorporation date from Companies House and describe it as such. That is the same discipline Full Fact applies to other people's claims.

Full Fact AI is the software side of the organisation, and it is sold rather than given away. The product page states: “These tools are now available for other organisations to use via a paid licence.” A reporter cannot sign up for it in the way they might sign up for a free verification tool; using or testing it is a conversation between Full Fact and an organisation.

What the tools do, on Full Fact's own description, is monitor news sites, live television speech, podcasts and social media, split that content into sentences, classify which sentences contain checkable claims and of what type, and match those claims against fact checks that have already been published. Full Fact says the tools “are now used by over 40 fact checking organisations working in three languages across 30 countries on a daily basis”.

Full Fact also says it has been using machine learning in this work for some time: “Since 2016, we've been using machine learning to improve and scale fact checking, working with international experts to identify how artificial intelligence can transform this work, to develop new tools and to deploy and evaluate them.”

It is worth quoting their own caution in full, because it is unusually restrained for an organisation selling AI tooling: “We are careful not to overstate our results. There are a lot of people who say that artificial intelligence is a panacea but we have been on the front line of fact checking since 2010 and we know first hand how difficult it is.”

There is no membership, no eligibility test and no application to read Full Fact. The published fact checks and the Misinformation Toolkit are open to anyone, and Full Fact states that all of its fact checking content is free. Nothing about being a journalist gives you a different level of access to that material than a member of the public has.

Training is a separate offer. Full Fact's training page says: “For journalists We run workshops in how to fact check and use open source intelligence (OSINT) tools to verify online information, both in the UK and abroad.” The wider description is of courses and workshops “in fact checking, critical thinking, OSINT, data analysis and information resilience”, with distinct strands for students, public bodies, business, charities and citizens alongside the journalist one.

On cost we can only tell you what is not there. Full Fact publishes no training fees, no course schedule and no booking mechanism on that page, so any figure you have seen quoted for a Full Fact workshop did not come from Full Fact's own site. If you are building a training budget, get a quote from them.

Funding. Full Fact states: “We rely on donations from individuals, charitable trusts, and corporate supporters.” The Charity Commission entry showing a small amount of government contract income alongside that is a useful cross-check if you are writing about who funds fact checking in the UK.

Impartiality. Rather than a statement of good intentions, Full Fact describes a staff-level control: “All staff are asked to complete a declaration of personal interests before they start work at Full Fact. Our staff agree to abstain from expressing political opinions in public.” That is a verifiable process rather than a promise, which is what you want to be able to point at when someone questions a fact checker's neutrality.

Not a regulator. None of this makes Full Fact a press regulator. It cannot adjudicate a complaint about your article, order a correction, or sanction a publisher. UK press and broadcast regulation sits with IPSO, IMPRESS and Ofcom.