In a coffee-table book about his first term published last year, US President-elect Donald Trump threatened to jail Mark Zuckerberg and suggested that the meta-CEO helped rig the 2020 election.
The conspiracy theory was widespread on social media. including on Meta’s own platforms Facebook and Instagram. It was eventually debunked by one one of the third-party groups that Meta paid to review popular content on its sites.
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced an abrupt end to Meta’s fact-checking program in the US, earning praise from Trump.
Zuckerberg’s move appeared aimed in part at protecting Meta from escalating efforts by Republican lawmakers and activists to cripple the fact-checking industry that has emerged alongside social media.
It also causes fact-checkers themselves to reflect on the value and effectiveness of their work in the face of the daily barrage of falsehoods.
“Fact checking has been under attack. Some areas of our politics in the US and around the world have turned it into a dirty word,” said Katie Sanders, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, which until this week was one of Meta’s fact-checking program partners.
“We are still at the very beginning of untangling 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, replacing it with a system similar to the “Community Notes” on Elon Musk’s X.
“Let’s just label it.”
Fact-checking is routine in the news media at least since the 1930s.
But as social media platforms became more popular in the 2000s, a number of publications—such as FactCheck.org and PolitiFact—emerged almost entirely dedicated to fact-checking the statements of public figures.
However, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 proved to be a turning point for this emerging industry.
The candidate’s penchant for telling falsehoods, as well as fears that social media could be used by foreign actors to manipulate public opinion, led to intense pressure on companies like Facebook to take action.
Facebook has partnered with several fact-checking agencies to review content flagged as potentially misleading. The program was eventually expanded to approximately 130 additional countries, including Canada.
“People really thought, let’s just label it. “We should just tell people what’s wrong and what’s not, and that will solve the problem,” said Katie Harbath, a former director of public policy at Facebook.
“But immediately there were challenges with the fact-checking program. They don’t have the ability to do it quickly and they don’t necessarily have the ability to do it at scale.”
These shortcomings often led to frustration among liberals, who felt that too much misinformation was falling through the cracks. Many conservatives, however, felt their content was being unfairly scrutinized.
Republican-led backlash
In recent years, suspicion of fact-checking programs has morphed into outright hostility.
Republicans in Congress and conservative activists targeted The Election Integrity Partnership, a fact-checking coalition of academics and other experts so many legal requirements that operations virtually ceased last June.
Trump’s nominee to lead the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has spent several weeks attacking the fact-checking efforts of major tech companies. He accused them of supporting a “censorship cartel” and threatened official action.
Carr singled out NewsGuard, a company that rates the credibility of news sites and has given poor ratings to pro-Trump outlets like NewsMax that spread false claims about the 2020 election. (Other conservative media outlets, including Fox News and the New York Post, are considered trustworthy.)
“Everyone is harmed by misinformation … whether the misinformation harms the left or the right, because it means people act with less complete understanding of the underlying facts than they should have,” said Gordon Crovitz, co-CEO from NewsGuard lifelong Republican and former editor of the Wall Street Journal.
“I think this is a very bipartisan issue. It has a kind of partisan appeal in the United States at the moment, but I think that’s fleeting. Trustworthy information is important for all sides in democracies.”
Zuckerberg is subject to fact-checking
Meta’s decision to end its fact-checking program was part of a broader series of changes aimed at easing content restrictions in the name of “free speech.”
These included new guidelines 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 “dramatically reduce the level of censorship on our platforms.”
Not surprisingly, his argument has been scrutinized by fact-checkers.
They pointed out that the program’s partners never removed content from Meta’s websites. Their work only appeared as a warning about content that was subject to thorough review.
“We have a really rigorous process for testing the claims that we want to fact-check. We have a plan to educate ourselves on this issue and get the final answer,” Sanders said. “It takes time – and, frankly, expertise.”
Ultimately, it was Meta’s decision to remove content or close a page, something the company rarely did, according to Sanders.
Much of what fact-checkers denounce on a daily basis is not political speech per se, but rather fraud and other forms of clickbait, said Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, a research center in New York.
“Those were the types of problems this program was designed to solve. “It was not intended to solve political lies that are as old as humanity,” said Mantzarlis, a 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 care products.
“I just expect it to become a junkie environment if these claims are allowed to spread unchallenged,” Sanders said.
Zuckerberg said the fact-checking program would be replaced with a process similar to Community Notes, the crowd-source approach used at 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 arguments, Mantzarlis said.
“The particular irony of Zuckerberg accusing fact-checkers of being ‘partisan’ is that his proposed alternative does not appear to be a haven for bipartisanship and kumbaya gathering,” he said.
With high supply comes high demand
Currently, Meta is just ending its fact-checking program in the US. A division of Agence France-Presse conducts fact-checks for Canada and continues to operate.
“It’s a hard blow to the fact-checking community and journalism. We are assessing the situation,” AFP said in a statement following Zuckerberg’s announcement.
Meta has been a major backer of fact-checking operations in the U.S., and its withdrawal will likely trigger a realignment within the industry, Sanders said.
“But it’s not something that can be killed. It will remain whether those in power like it or not,” she said.
In fact, demand for fact-checking from advertisers is at an all-time high given the endless supply of misinformation, Crovitz said.
“There is a tremendous amount of misinformation, whether from Russia, China, Iran or from hallucinating generative AI models,” he said.
“And there are more and more companies that are concerned about misinformation and want to be sure they are not contributing to it.”
