NORDIS’ Danish fact-checking partner TjekDet has won the international “Global Fact-Checking Award 2026” together with the Danish newspaper Politiken, the Dutch outlet Bellingcat, and the Canadian broadcaster CBC at the award ceremony in Vilnius for their investigation exposing the person behind MrDeepFakes.
When the four media outlets published the investigation, MrDeepFakes was the world’s largest website for deepfake pornography, where well-known people – almost always women – were manipulated into pornographic videos with the help of artificial intelligence.
Among the victims were actors, TV presenters, influencers, and politicians.
The investigation led to the website shutting down in May last year. Before that, it was visited by several million users every single month.
“When we began this work, it was not only about finding the man behind the world’s largest deepfake pornography website. Above all, it was about the thousands of people whose faces, identities, and privacy were abused without their consent. That is why it means a great deal to us that this particular story is now being recognised internationally,” says TjekDet Editor-in-Chief Thomas Hedin.
The Global Fact-Checking Award is organised by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which is headquartered at the Poynter Institute in the United States.
This year, the award was presented in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the annual GlobalFact conference, which brings together investigative media organisations, fact-checkers, and researchers from around the world.
The award was given in the category “Global Fact-Checking Award for Collaboration”, which recognises fact-checking work across media outlets and countries that has resulted in “groundbreaking investigations or substantially expanded impact”, as stated in the award description.
You can read TjekDet’s and the other media outlets’ investigation here.
Faktisk was nominated
Another of NORDIS’ fact-checking partners, the Norwegian outlet Faktisk, was also nominated for an award in the category “Global Fact-Checking Award for Gold Standard”, which is given to fact-checking journalism that represents the highest standard of the craft.
The nomination was based on the podcast “Hvem trollet Innlandet?” (“Who Trolled Innlandet?” in English), in which Faktisk, together with the Norwegian local newspaper GD, reveals how a local conflict over school closures in Norway’s Innlandet region was influenced by a mysterious Facebook group and anonymous, pro-Russian users.
The category was won by ICIR and FactCheckHub from Nigeria, which won the award for their coverage of AI-assisted Ponzi schemes in Nigeria.
You can listen to the nominated podcast by Faktisk and GD here.