Fact-Checking Organizations in Mainland China: Characteristics, Verification Approaches, and Practices

This study examines fact-checking in mainland China’s hybrid-authoritarian media system, focusing on the intersection of state authority, platform governance, and audience participation. We analyzed 2,719 text-based fact checks from 7 institutions and 3,026 short videos from 3 individual fact-checkers on Douyin (2022–2025), employing BERTopic-based topic modeling, qualitative institutional analysis, and manual content coding on a stratified subsample ( n = 400). The analysis identified four models: official, professional-commercial, independent-academic, and individual. Fact-checking appears pluralistic yet state-integrated, balancing political constraints and platform logic with procedural transparency and selective silence. This study advances a contextualized understanding of verification as epistemic governance within a hybrid-authoritarian media system.