The Western practice of fact-checking: from enacting epistemic certainty to performing epistemic mediation?

Fact-checking is met with growing public resistance in Western democracies: contested for its affirmed impartiality. The scholarly debate about the impartiality of the fact-checking practice too is stuck in an endless yo-yo motion: permanently vacillating between claims of being irrevocably unbiased or irremediably subjective. Contributing to Critical Disinformation Studies, the paper demonstrates how a prevailing atomist perception of fake news validates the persistent—though increasingly problematised—modelling of Western fact-checking into an impartial fake news detector. Inspired by Karen Barad’s work, the paper therefore introduces a dual relational-atomist fact-checking model that arguably stands a better chance at receiving public endorsement.