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In a coffee book published last year about his first term, US President-elect Donald Trump threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg, suggesting the Meta CEO helped rig the 2020 election.
The conspiracy theory was widely circulated on social networks, including on Meta’s own platforms, Facebook and Instagram. In the end, he exposed him one a group of third parties paid by Meta to fact-check popular content on its sites.
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced the abrupt end to Meta’s fact-checking program in the US, drawing praise from Trump.
Zuckerberg’s move appears to be aimed in part at protecting Meta from escalating efforts by Republican lawmakers and activists to cripple the fact-checking industry that grew out of social media.
It also causes a reckoning among the fact-checkers themselves about the value and effectiveness of their work amidst the daily tidal wave of falsehoods.
“Fact-checking is under attack. Some corners of our politics in the US and around the world have made it a bad word,” said Katie Sanders, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, which until this week was one of the partners in Meta’s fact-checking program.
“We’re still in the very early stages of dealing with the implications. But there’s certainly an anxiety in the air.”
Meta is ending its fact-checking program on Facebook, Instagram and Threads in the US and replacing it with a system similar to the ‘Community Notes’ on Elon Musk-owned X.
‘Let’s just label it’
Fact-checking was a routine feature in the media at least since the 1930s.
But as social media platforms grew in popularity in the 2000s, a number of publications — such as FactCheck.org and PolitiFact — emerged almost entirely devoted to verifying the statements of public figures.
However, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 proved to be a watershed moment for this nascent industry.
The candidate’s penchant for telling falsehoods, along with concerns about social media being used by foreign actors to manipulate public opinion, has put intense pressure on companies like Facebook to take action.
Facebook has partnered with several fact-checking outlets to review content it has flagged as potentially misleading. The program eventually expanded to about 130 other countries, including Canada.
“People really thought, let’s just label it. We should just tell people what’s fake and what’s not, and that will solve the problem,” said Katie Harbath, Facebook’s former director of public policy.
“But there were immediate challenges with the fact-checking program. They’re not able to do it quickly and they’re not necessarily able to do it in large numbers.”
These shortcomings were often a source of frustration for liberals, who felt that too much misinformation was going down the drain. Many conservatives, on the other hand, believed their content was unfairly targeted for scrutiny.
Republican-led reaction
In recent years, suspicion of fact-checking programs has turned into open hostility.
Congressional Republicans and conservative activists have targeted The Election Integrity Partnership, a fact-checking coalition of academics and other experts. so many legal requirements that it actually went out of business last June.
Trump’s pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has spent weeks attacking the fact-checking efforts of big tech companies. He accused them of supporting a “censorship cartel” and threatened regulatory action.
Carr singled out NewsGuard, a company that rates the credibility of news sites, and has given low marks to pro-Trump outlets that have spread false claims about the 2020 election, such as NewsMax. (Other conservative outlets, including Fox News and the New York Post, were rated as reliable.)
“Everyone is harmed by misinformation … whether misinformation hurts the left or the right, because it means people are operating with a less complete understanding of the underlying facts than they should have,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz, a lifelong Republican and former Wall Street publisher. Journal.
“I think this is very much a bipartisan issue. It’s taken on a partisan tone in the United States right now, but I think that’s fleeting. Reliable information is important for all parties in democracies.”
Zuckerberg is fact checked
Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking program was part of a broader series of changes aimed at easing restrictions on content in the name of “freedom of speech.”
This includes new policies which allow users to call LGBTQ people mentally ill or abnormal.
In a five-minute video announcing the changes, Zuckerberg said Meta’s fact-checkers were “too politically biased.”
Ending the program, he added, “will dramatically reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.”
His reasoning, not surprisingly, has come under scrutiny from fact-checkers.
They pointed out that the partners in the program have never removed content from Meta’s pages. Their work appeared only as a warning with content that had undergone a thorough review.
“We have a really rigorous process to test the claims we make to fact-check. We have a plan for how we’re going to learn about this topic and get a definitive answer,” Sanders said. “It takes time — and expertise, frankly.”
In the end, Meta decided whether to remove the content or shut down the site, something the company rarely did, according to Sanders.
Most of what fact-checkers flagged on a daily basis was not political speech per se, but scams and other forms of clickbait, said Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Safety, Trust and Security Initiative at Cornell Tech, a New York think tank. York.
“Those were the things this program was supposed to address. It wasn’t supposed to address political lying, which is as old as humanity,” said Mantzarlis, the former director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which helped Facebook establish its fact-checking program.
PolitiFact’s work for Meta has included correcting information about mass shootings, natural disasters and ineffective or dangerous health drugs.
“I would simply expect it to become a more toxic environment when these claims can be spread unchallenged,” Sanders said.
Zuckerberg said the fact-checking program would be replaced by a process similar to Community Notes, the crowd-sourcing approach used on X.
While crowd-sourced fact-checking can be effective with the right incentives, X’s Community Notes feature is mostly a forum for further partisan bickering, Mantzarlis said.
“The particular irony of Zuckerberg’s throwing fact-checkers under the bus as ‘partisan’ is that his proposed alternative doesn’t look like a rallying point for bipartisanship and Kumbaya,” he said.
With great supply comes great demand
Currently, Meta is just finishing up its fact-checking program in the US. The Agence France-Presse department provides fact-checking for Canada and continues to operate.
“It is a severe blow to the fact-checking community and journalism. We are assessing the situation,” AFP said in a statement after Zuckerberg’s announcement.
Meta was a major funder of fact-checking operations in the U.S., and its withdrawal is likely to cause a realignment within the industry, Sanders said.
“But it’s not something that can be killed. It’s here to stay, whether the people in power like it or not,” she said.
In fact, given the endless supply of misinformation, the demand for fact-checking by advertisers has never been higher, Crovitz said.
“There is a huge amount of disinformation, whether it’s coming from Russia, China, Iran or hallucinating generative AI models,” he said.
“And there’s a growing number of entities that are concerned about misinformation and want to make sure they’re not contributing to it.”
