In a short book published last year about his first term in office, US President-elect Donald Trump threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg, suggesting that the Meta CEO helped rig the 2020 election.
The conspiracy theory spread widely on social media. Included On Meta’s own platforms, Facebook and Instagram. It was eventually debunked by one From third-party groups that Meta has paid to fact-check popular content on its sites.
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced an abrupt end to Meta’s fact-checking program in the US, drawing praise from Trump.
Zuckerberg’s move appears aimed in part at protecting the meta from escalating efforts by Republican lawmakers and activists to cripple the fact-checking industry that has arisen alongside social media.
It also causes a reckoning among fact-checkers themselves about the value and effectiveness of their work amid a daily tidal wave of falsehoods.
“Fact-checking has been under attack,” said Katie Sanders, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, which until this week was one of the top sites. “It has been turned into a bad word by some corners of our politics in the United States and around the world.” A partner in Meta’s fact-checking program.
“We are still in the early stages of uncovering the implications. But there is definitely concern 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” system on Elon Musk’s X.
“Let’s just call it”
Fact-checking has become a routine feature of the news media Since at least the 1930s.
But as social media platforms grew in popularity in the 2000s, a number of publications emerged—such as FactCheck.org and PolitiFact—dedicated almost entirely to fact-checking 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 tendency to spout lies, coupled with concerns about the use of social media 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 they flag as potentially misleading. The program eventually expanded to include about 130 other countries, including Canada.
“People really thought, ‘Let’s just call it out. We should just tell people what’s not true, what’s not, and that’ll solve the problem,'” said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook.
“But right away there were challenges with the fact-checking program. They’re not able to do it quickly and they’re not necessarily able to do it at scale.”
These shortcomings were often a source of frustration for liberals, who felt that too much misinformation was falling through the cracks. On the other hand, many conservatives believe their content has been unfairly targeted for verification.
Republican-led backlash
In recent years, skepticism about fact-checking programs has turned into outright hostility.
Congressional Republicans and conservative activists have targeted the Election Integrity Partnership, a fact-checking coalition of academics and other experts, with Lots of legal demands It actually stopped working last June.
Brendan Carr, Trump’s pick to lead the FCC, has spent several weeks attacking Big Tech’s fact-checking efforts. He accused them of supporting a “censorship cartel” and threatened to take regulatory action.
Carr singled out NewsGuard, a company that rates the credibility of news sites and gave low scores to pro-Trump outlets that spread false claims about the 2020 election, such as NewsMax. (Other conservative media outlets, including Fox News and the New York Post, are rated as trustworthy.)
“Everyone is harmed by misinformation…whether misinformation hurts the left or the right, because it means people operate with a less complete understanding of basic facts than they should,” said NewsGuard co-CEO Gordon Crovitz. A lifelong Republican and former publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
“I think this is very much a bipartisan issue. It’s taking on a partisan tone at the moment in the United States, but I think that’s fleeting. Reliable information is important for all parties in democracies.”
Zuckerberg is being validated
Meta’s decision to discontinue its fact-checking program was part of a broader set of changes aimed at easing content restrictions in the name of “freedom of expression.”
These included New policies Which allows users to connect with LGBTQ people with mental illnesses or abnormalities.
In a five-minute video announcing the changes, Zuckerberg said Meta’s fact-checkers are “very politically biased.”
He added that ending the program “will significantly reduce the amount of censorship on our platforms.”
Not surprisingly, his reasons have been subject to scrutiny by fact-checkers.
They noted that the program partners never removed content from Meta sites. Their work only appears as a warning attached to content that has undergone extensive review.
“We have a really rigorous process for testing the claims that we set out to investigate. We have a plan for how we’re going to learn about this topic and get the final answer,” Sanders said. “It takes time and experience, frankly.”
Meta’s final decision was to remove the content or shut down the page, something the company rarely does, according to Sanders.
Much of what fact-checkers pointed out daily was not political rhetoric per se, but scams and other forms of clickbait, said Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, a research center in New South Wales. York.
“This was the kind of thing this program was supposed to solve,” said Mantzarlis, former director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which helped Facebook. “It was not meant to solve political lying, which is as old as humanity.” Set up a fact-checking program.
PolitiFact’s work for Meta has included correcting information about mass shootings, natural disasters, and ineffective or dangerous health treatments.
“I expect the environment will become more virulent as these allegations spread unchallenged,” Sanders said.
Zuckerberg said the fact-checking software will be replaced with a process similar to Community Notes, the crowdsourcing approach used in X.
While crowd-sourcing fact-checking can be effective with the right incentives, the community feedback feature on X is essentially a forum for more partisan bickering, Mantzarlis said.
“The particular irony of Zuckerberg throwing fact-checkers under the bus and calling them ‘partisan’ is that the alternative he proposes doesn’t sound like a haven of bipartisanship and kumbaya,” he said.
With high supply comes high demand
Currently, Meta is only ending its fact-checking program in the United States. A division of AFP provides the fact-checking service in Canada and continues to operate.
“It is a huge blow to the fact-checking and journalism community. We are assessing the situation,” AFP said in a statement following Zuckerberg’s announcement.
Meta was a major funder of fact-checking in the US, and its decline would likely lead to a realignment within the industry, Sanders said.
“But it’s not something that can be killed. It’s here to stay, regardless of whether people in power like it or not,” she added.
In fact, given the endless supply of misinformation, the demand for fact-checking by advertisers has never been higher, Crovitz said.
“There’s a tremendous amount of misinformation out there, whether it’s from Russia, China, Iran, or from hallucinatory generative AI models,” he said.
“A growing number of entities are concerned about misinformation and want to make sure they are not contributing to it.”
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