The impact of Zuckerberg’s decision to pull Meta from its 3rd-party fact-checking program on the spread of disinformation on social media
According to Duke, it is disappointing to hear Mark Zuckerberg accuse the organizations in Meta’s US third-party fact-checking program of being “too politically biased.” “Let me fact-check that. Lead Stories abides by the highest journalistic standards required by theInternational Fact-Checking Network code of principles. There is no point in checking where a false claim starts on the political spectrum.
“Meta didn’t owe fact-checkers anything, but it knows that by pulling this partnership it’s removing a very significant source of funding for the ecosystem globally,” says Alexios Mantzarlis, who helped establish the first partnerships between fact-checkers and Facebook between 2015 and 2019 as director of the International Fact Checking Network.
The news organizations who had partnered with Meta to tackle the spread of disinformation on the platform from 2016 are scrambling to figure out how this change will impact them.
Duke says Lead Stories has a diverse revenue stream and most of its operations are outside of the US, but he claims the decision would still have an impact on them. “The most painful part of this is losing some very good, experienced journalists, who will no longer be paid to research false claims found on Meta platforms,” Duke says.
The managing editor of Meta fact-checking partner Check Your Fact tells WIRED that they were not aware of what was happening. He has 10 people in the newsroom with his organization, which is working with Meta. It was out of the left field for us. We weren’t aware this decision was being considered until Mark dropped the video overnight.”
Meta partners with dozens of fact-checking organizations and newsrooms across the globe, 10 of which are based in the US, where Meta’s new rules will first apply.
Meta’s chief global affairs officer wrote a post about the change in their use of their services on Tuesday morning, followed by a video from the Meta CEO. X-style Community Notes will allow users to flag content that they believe is incorrect or requires further explanation.
It is a social networking company with close ties to the Trump administration. It deploys a “community notes” system to fight misinformation and lets hateful comments fly under the banner of “free speech.” It has a lot of side-gigs in artificial intelligence. It’s setting up shop in Texas. It is operated by a guy worth hundreds of billions of dollars and a person who is also a few decades younger. No, not X. It’s Meta.
It may soon be hard to tell the difference. Meta this week said it would torpedo its fact-checking partners in favor of X’s “community notes” model (a comparison Meta chief global policy officer Joel Kaplan made directly in a blog post yesterday) and used the fig leaf of “free speech” to make alarmingly permissive changes to its Hateful Conduct policy. Last week, it appointed friend of Donald Trump and Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO Dana White to its board, and elevated Kaplan, who is firmly entrenched in Republican circles.
But at what cost? Well, potentially plenty. Community notes can be used as part of a broader moderation system and fact-checking is not beyond reproach. Kaplan’s announcement of the changes and the accompanying video did not give much hope that this will be an upgrade.