Evgeny Safronov on the Importance of Fact-Checking in Media: "Educated Adults are No Less Susceptible to Manipulation and Distortions Than Children and Teenagers"

Evgeny Safronov, Head of the Media Center of the World Peoples Assembly, founder of the InterMedia News Agency, journalist, analyst, expert in culture and the entertainment industry, Academician of the Academy of Russian Music, delivered a speech at the opening session of the International Media Club of the World Peoples Assembly "Trust in Media, Digital Transformation, and Fact-Checking: Trends and Challenges for 21st Century Media" held on June 16, 2026, in Salvador, Brazil.

Dear friends and colleagues!

Just two months ago, we held the first session of the International Media Club of the World Peoples Assembly in New Delhi — and we immediately received feedback from different countries, which confirmed the importance of our initiative. The World Peoples Assembly will continue to develop the International Media Club on all continents, overcoming difficulties and any possible technical challenges. I am grateful to all of you for your participation, and especially to Nikita Anisimov for the excellent organization of today's event.

At our first session, particular interest was sparked by the topic of the reliability of published information and the tools for verifying it. We thank the GFCN Association, which unites 108 experts from 53 countries, as well as the TASS news agency, for the opportunity to learn about their valuable developments — first and foremost, the Code of Responsible Fact-Checking.

This is especially important now. Over the past year alone, neural networks, which we mistakenly call artificial intelligence, have penetrated the work of media on a broad front, radically changing the information landscape and saturating it with a multitude of both accidental and deliberate errors. Today, the accuracy of every word in the media comes to the fore, and such an assessment is practically impossible to carry out alone, even for the largest publications. The solution is systematic cooperation based on common standards, despite geographic and cultural differences.

For those who did not participate in the first session, let me reiterate some of the points made then.

The Media Club brings together professionals who have devoted their entire lives to media. But let us be honest: how often do we think about the lofty purpose of our work, our place in civilization? In direct translation, "media" means means, technical intermediaries in communication between people, and they appeared together with human society about 45,000 years ago.

Society is changing ever faster, and the media naturally keep pace with it, or even outpace it in development. Let us look at the most recent major achievement of civilization from a culturometric perspective. Over the past 200 years, humanity has shown staggering momentum. In terms of the number of people living on Earth alone, it has grown eightfold, has learned for the most part to read and even write, to communicate instantaneously over distances, to move at previously unimaginable speeds by trains and airplanes… People have divided the entire Earth among themselves, almost conquered hunger, and achieved an unprecedented level of freedom, which has primarily led to the emergence of significant free time. According to research, people spend this time in accordance with their purpose — on communication, on interaction. In response to public demand, new art forms have appeared in the media for the first time in several thousand years: cinema, sound recording, radio, television.

In just a few decades, the internet has completely transformed the entire media sphere. The intensity of information exchange, especially in the creative field, has grown — just think! — by hundreds of billions of times. It would seem that this could become a foundation for communication, peace, friendship, and mutual understanding. But not only have people not stopped fighting; they have begun to use new inventions to struggle for power. The number of states on the planet has grown fivefold, but we should not forget that there are only 220 of them, while the number of nations and ethnic groups on Earth ranges from three to seven thousand, and this cannot be ignored.

Should we count on raising the literacy and cultural level of the population in order to prevent wars and strive for peace? No, we should not. The history of recent years clearly shows that the bloodiest wars were initiated and waged by the elites of the most cultured and civilized nations, pushing their trusting and well-educated populations into the abyss.

The internet has provided people with immense opportunities to express their talents and abilities, drastically reducing the distance between authors and audiences, but at the same time it has created a basis for the lightning-fast spread of controlling narratives, often destructive to society. It immediately became clear that educated adults are no less — and perhaps even more — susceptible to manipulation and distortions than children and teenagers. Most people have already learned to read, but they have not yet learned to reflect and get to the heart of the matter.

There is little hope for the education system. State capacities, in my view, have already reached their limit, but that is precisely why direct public ties are growing and gaining authority, and public diplomacy is expanding in many directions at once. The media system is transforming dynamically: newspapers are turning into television channels, magazines into websites, and all together into integrated media and holdings. Adaptive media based on neural networks are on the horizon. And we are talking not only about content, but also about multi-format delivery, up to and including a complete abandonment of the very concept of "format." I am confident that this approach represents the future, yet making predictions is a thankless task. We will see how events unfold. In the meantime, we, representatives of responsible and competent media, must fulfill our duty — to help people navigate the whirlpool of events and opinions, to weed out charlatans, and to uphold universal human values.

Thank you. I wish the Media Club every success in its work.