When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that the media giant would eliminate third-party censorship and reduce its control over sensitive topics, he suggested it reflected the zeitgeist.
The re-election of US President-elect Donald Trump has shown a “cultural enabler” for free speech to succeed, Zuckerberg said.
In many ways, he was right.
Less than a decade after Donald Trump and Brexit spurred US tech platforms to crack down on online disinformation, the tide has shifted dramatically in favor of voices arguing for an unregulated and powerless internet.
“The Meta move is a big step, it's a global review,” John P Wihbey, associate professor of innovation and technology at Northeastern University in Canada, told Al Jazeera.
“My opinion is that this change is also driven by political changes and business needs, because media organizations need to move the resources that are missing to help people in other ways.”
If it hasn't ended yet, the era of fact-finding seems to be on its way back.
After a three-fold increase in less than a decade, the number of active research projects worldwide will peak in 2022 at 457, according to a Duke Reporters' Lab release.
Even Google searches for the words “check the truth” and “fake” hit their watermarks in 2020 and 2022, respectively, according to the analysis of the research conducted by the statistician and forecaster of the US elections Nate Silver.
For monitoring projects that have been financially and politically successful so far, Meta's move raises questions about their sustainability as many of the initiatives relied on funding from the tech giant.
Meta has spent $100m between 2016 and 2022 supporting fact-checking programs certified by the International Fact-Checking Network, according to the company.
Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, Elon Musk, one of Trump's most powerful allies, pulled the political headquarters of X, formerly Twitter, to the right and showed what happens on the platform.
Fighting Trump
Disinformation experts criticized Meta's move and accused Zuckerberg of siding with Trump — who often accuses Big Tech and social media of being in league with his opponents — as he approaches power.
“I see that Meta's idea is part of a movement that has spread among US institutions to listen to Trump's demands, which will also involve trying to eliminate the idea of not only searching for facts and the existence of facts,” Stephan Lewandowsky, professor of psychology at the University of Bristol who they learn lies, he told Al Jazeera.
“That's a classic move in the autocrat's playbook because it removes any opportunity for accountability and stifles evidence-based debate.”
But for conservatives in the U.S., the change validates their long-standing complaint that fact-checking processes and content-regulatory decisions are too skewed in favor of liberals.
In a 2019 Pew poll, 70 percent of Republicans said they believed pollsters were biased, compared to 29 percent of Democrats and 47 percent of independents.
In his announcement, Zuckerberg himself expressed such concerns, saying that “fact-checkers have become too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the US”.
Taking a page from Musk's book, he said that Meta will enter into “group notes” similar to those used by X, where explanatory notes are added to the content of the content using a contract.
Zuckerburg also responded to conservative complaints about the content by promising to remove restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender that are “not relevant to the general public”.
“What started out as a collective movement has been used a lot to shut down ideas and shut out people with different views, and it's gone too far,” he said.
Fact-checking organizations have denied the allegations of bias and insisted that platforms like Meta have always been very open about their use of what appears to be false information.
“Factual journalism has never tried or removed documents; they are exaggerated and contradictory stories, and they are false and hypocritical,” Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said in a post on LinkedIn on Wednesday.
Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies fake news and disinformation, said arguments about bias in fact-finding efforts are misconceived.
“In any good democratic matter, you want people to give evidence in public to say what kind and what kind of statements should not be believed and what should not be believed, and it is always up to you to make a decision to believe what you have heard,” Manda told Al Jazeera.
“We want journalists and researchers to do their best to determine what is true and what is not in political news stories that often contain information from all political spectrums,” added Graves.
There is research showing that researchers, like journalists, often lean disproportionately to their political affiliations, although it is difficult to say how this will affect their agenda.
In a 2023 survey of 150 falsificationists from around the world conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School, 126 of them were identified as “slightly left-wing”, “left-wing” or “left-wing”.
At the same time, various studies also show that right-leaning people are more likely to be lied to than their liberal counterparts.
Some critics of fact-finding groups, such as Silver, who founded the website thirty-eight predictions, said that investigators often focus on cases, or claims that cannot be proven one way or the other, for their reasons. liberal leanings.
“The assessment of Biden's age was one example,” Mr. Silver wrote on Substack on Thursday, referring to the myths about the health of US President Joe Biden's physical and mental health before he decided to withdraw from the 2024 elections.
“While it's obviously an appropriate subject to ask the press, claims that the White House is covering up Biden's weaknesses are often dismissed as 'conspiracy' theories, even though subsequent reports have confirmed them.”
Wihbey, a professor at Northeastern University, said that although fact-checking methods are limited in their ability to resolve all disputes about the truth, it is an example of a critical voice that is very important to democratic and liberal societies.
“It is true that on many things there is a conflict of morals, not just facts, and it is difficult for researchers to make a strong decision on which party is right. But in any case, good, mature, informed journalism can add to the story and provide some information about what is being discussed,” he said.
“Good speech in a democratic society is one in which conflicting opinions conflict with truth.”
Although research has shown that efforts to find the truth can have a positive effect on disproving falsehoods, the results seem to be limited, especially due to the amount of information on the Internet.
A large 2023 study of nearly 33,000 people in the US found that cautionary texts and technology education helped students read headlines as true or false — but only by 5-10 percent.
Donald Kimball, editor of Tech Exchange at the Washington Policy Institute, which is affiliated with the conservative State Policy Network, said that censorship measures have often failed to change opinion in the same way that banning Trump from major social media platforms has not. his followers are gone.
“I think in the new economy the 'reality check' concept is no longer dead,” Kimball told Al Jazeera.
“Maybe in the media that was popular before, it was easy to kill any other news, but now people are seeing the opinions of people who agree with them. You are no longer crazy because you disagree with the facts when you can see other groups and communities arguing about it. I also think that people are tired of being told what they see in their eyes that it is wrong.”
About the future of fact-finding?
Wihbey said that the history of media is filled with new forms of journalism that came and went because of social, cultural and political changes.
“Perhaps the fact-finding movement will re-emerge in new ways, but the very nature of the media and its quality will change – it may not even be called 'fact-finding' anymore,” he said.
“What I hope we don't lose is to encourage journalism to follow the facts as much as possible. This does not mean some kind of hubris and the idea that journalism has all the answers. But I think that a certain approach – which says that we are ready to change our opinion – and which looks for unity in real ways is to accept open debate, that is the proper stance of journalism.”