In a book published last year about his first term, US President-elect Donald Trump threatened to imprison Mark Zuckerberg, suggesting the Meta CEO helped rig the 2020 election.
The conspiracy theory had widely circulated on social networks, including on Meta’s own platforms, Facebook and Instagram. It was eventually debunked by A third-party groups that Meta has paid to fact-check popular content on its sites.
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced the abrupt end of the Meta fact-checking program in the United States, drawing praise from Trump.
Zuckerberg’s move appears aimed, in part, at protecting Meta from growing efforts by Republican lawmakers and activists to cripple the fact-checking industry that has arisen alongside social media.
It also causes the fact-checkers themselves to realize the value and effectiveness of their work, amid the daily tidal wave of lies.
“Fact-checking has been under attack. It has been turned into a dirty word by certain sectors of our politics in the United States and around the world,” said Katie Sanders, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, which until this week was one of the partners of Meta’s fact-checking program.
“We’re still in the very early stages of understanding the implications. But there’s anxiety in the air, that’s for sure.”
Meta is ending its fact-checking program on Facebook, Instagram and Threads in the United States and replacing it with a system similar to the “Community Notes” on X, owned by Elon Musk.
“Let’s just label it”
Fact-checking has become a common feature in 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 — devoted almost entirely to fact-checking the statements of public figures.
The election of Donald Trump in 2016, however, proved to be a watershed moment for this emerging industry.
The candidate’s penchant for telling lies, along with concerns about foreign actors using social media to manipulate public opinion, has generated intense pressure on companies like Facebook to act.
Facebook has partnered with several fact-checking organizations 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 label it. We should just tell people what’s fake and what’s not, and that will solve the problem,” said Katie Harbath, former director of public policy at Facebook.
“But the fact-checking program immediately ran into difficulties. They’re not able to do it quickly and they’re not necessarily able to do it at scale.”
These gaps have often been a source of frustration for liberals, who felt that too much misinformation was slipping through the cracks. Many conservatives, on the other hand, felt their content was unfairly targeted for verification.
Reaction led by the Republicans
In recent years, suspicion of 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 so many legal requests that it effectively ceased its activities last June.
Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has spent several weeks attacking the fact-checking efforts of big tech companies. He accused them of supporting a “censorship cartel” and threatened regulatory action.
Carr pointed to NewsGuard, a company that rates the credibility of news sites and has given low ratings to pro-Trump media outlets that have spread false claims about the 2020 election, like NewsMax. (Other conservative media outlets, including Fox News and the New York Post, are considered trustworthy.)
“Everyone is harmed by misinformation…whether misinformation harms the left or the right, because it means people are operating with a less complete understanding of the underlying facts than they should have. be,” said Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO of NewsGuard. A lifelong Republican and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
“I think this is a very bipartisan issue. It’s taking on a partisan tinge in the United States at the moment, but I think that’s fleeting. Reliable information is important to all parties in democracies. ”
Zuckerberg gets the facts checked
Meta’s decision to remove the fact-checking program was part of a broader set of changes aimed at loosening content restrictions in the name of “free speech.”
These included new policies which allow users to label LGBTQ people as mentally ill or abnormal.
In the five-minute video announcing the changes, Zuckerberg said Meta’s fact-checkers were “too politically biased.”
Ending the program, he added, “will significantly reduce the level of censorship on our platforms.”
Unsurprisingly, his reasoning was scrutinized by fact-checkers.
They emphasized that the program’s partners have never removed content from Meta’s sites. Their work only appeared as a disclaimer attached to content that had undergone extensive review.
“We have a very rigorous process for testing the claims that we have decided to verify. We have a plan for how we are going to learn more about this and get the definitive answer,” Sanders said. “It takes time – and expertise, frankly.”
It was ultimately up to Meta to decide whether to remove content or shut down a page, something the company rarely did, according to Sanders.
Much of what fact-checkers were reporting daily was not political speech per se, but rather scams and other forms of clickbait, said Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security Initiative, of trust and safety at Cornell Tech, a research center in New York. York.
“These are the kinds of problems this program was supposed to solve. It was not intended to solve political lying, which is as old as humanity,” said Mantzarlis, former director of the International Fact-Checking Network , which helped Facebook set up its fact-checking program.
PolitiFact’s work for Meta included correcting information about mass shootings, natural disasters, and ineffective or dangerous health remedies.
“I would just expect the environment to become more dangerous when these claims are allowed to proliferate unchallenged,” Sanders said.
Zuckerberg said the fact-checking program would be replaced with a process similar to Community Notes, the crowdsourced approach used on X.
While crowdsourced fact-checking can be effective with the right incentives, the Community Notes feature on X is primarily a forum for further partisan squabbling, Mantzarlis said.
“The particular irony of Zuckerberg dismissing fact-checkers as ‘partisan’ is that the alternative he proposes does not appear to be a refuge for bipartisanship and the Kumbaya meeting,” he said. he declared.
High supply leads to high demand
For now, Meta is only ending its fact-checking program in the United States. A division of Agence France-Presse provides fact-checking for Canada and continues its activities.
“This is a blow to the fact-checking community and to journalism. We are evaluating the situation,” AFP said in a statement following Zuckerberg’s announcement.
Meta was a major funder of fact-checking operations in the United States, and its removal will likely trigger a reorganization 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 has never been greater from advertisers, Crovitz said.
“There is a huge amount of misinformation, whether it comes from Russia, China, Iran or mind-blowing models of generative AI,” he said.
“And there are a growing number of entities that are concerned about misinformation and want to be sure they are not contributing to it.”
