Fact check: Did factually.co publish an article claiming to list five questions but fail to include them?

1. Why the direct evidence favors “included,” not “omitted” — a clear read of the article

The clearest relevant source is an article on factually.co titled “How these 5 key questions could define American politics ...,” which explicitly lists the five questions within the body of the piece, directly contradicting the assertion that the questions were promised but not presented. The article’s presence and content are dated to January 1, 2025, and its headline and structure make the stated ambition—to present five defining questions—transparent and fulfilled in the article text. This single-source confirmation is decisive for the narrow factual claim about presence versus omission, because it demonstrates the publisher delivered the enumerated content ^[1].

2. Other sources reviewed add no support for the omission allegation and are largely unrelated

Across the collected background materials, several texts touch on disinformation, editorial omissions as a concept, and lists of dubious news sources, but none substantively engage the specific allegation about factually.co failing to include promised questions. Two pieces focused on online disinformation and fake-news lists do not reference factually.co or the five-question article, and a separate set of documents discuss editorial omission generally without linking to the claimed instance. The absence of corroboration in multiple unrelated documents weakens the claim that a factual omission occurred at factually.co, since independent confirmation or complaint would be expected if a prominent publisher had published an incomplete list ^{[2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]}.

3. Timeline and provenance: the article exists and is dated; other materials postdate or ignore it

The factually.co article is dated January 1, 2025, which establishes a fixed publication point for verifying its contents. The other materials in the dataset range across 2025 and 2026 but either address tangential topics or compile lists of unreliable sites; none provide contemporaneous documentation of an omission or retraction tied to that January 2025 article. With a dated primary source showing the five questions present and no contemporaneous corrections or discussions in the reviewed corpus, the balance of evidence supports that the article delivered on its stated list ^{[1] [2] [8]}.

4. Why confusion or the allegation might have arisen — signals from the reviewed corpus

Although the dataset provides no direct evidence that factually.co omitted the promised questions, it does include materials about fake-news lists and editorial errors, which can generate confusion about article completeness. Several sources catalog dubious sites or discuss omission as an editorial error type, and such contextual materials may lead third parties to conflate different incidents or misattribute an omission to factually.co. The presence of lists of fake-news websites and discussions of editorial omission in the same corpus suggests a plausible source of misattribution, though that remains a contextual inference rather than a documented fact about the specific article ^{[4] [8] [5]}.

5. Multiple viewpoints and potential agendas in the materials reviewed

The reviewed materials include a mix of fact-checking context, compilations of suspicious sites, and commentary on editorial practice. Some documents aim to catalog unreliable outlets (a preventive-public-interest agenda), while others explain omission as an editorial phenomenon (an explanatory or cautionary agenda). These differing objectives can shape how a piece is reported or remembered—a preventive list may highlight omissions as evidence of unreliability, while explanatory pieces treat omission as a technical error. The available evidence does not show that factually.co was singled out for malfeasance; instead, the specific article appears to have met its stated purpose ^{[4] [8] [5]}.

6. Bottom line: evidence-based conclusion and what remains unproven

The factual record in the reviewed dataset affirms that factually.co published an article that lists five defining questions and that those questions appear in the article itself; there is no substantiating documentation in the provided materials that the site claimed five questions but failed to include them. Therefore the claim of omission is unsupported by the available evidence. What remains unproven is why the allegation surfaced elsewhere—whether from misreading, misattribution, caching errors, or other sources not included in this dataset—because none of the supplied documents documents such an error or a retraction tied to the factually.co article ^{[1] [2] [7]}.