In a book published last year about his first term, US President-elect Donald Trump threatened Mark Zuckerberg with prison, suggesting that the Meta CEO helped steal the 2020 election.
The conspiracy theory received wide coverage on social media, including: including on its own Meta, Facebook and Instagram platforms. This was ultimately denied by one third-party groups that Meta paid to review popular content on its sites.
On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced an abrupt end to the Meta fact-checking program in the US, drawing praise from Trump.
Zuckerberg's move seemed intended in part to protect Meta from escalating efforts by Republican lawmakers and activists to cripple the fact-checking industry that has sprung up alongside social media.
It also causes fact-checkers themselves to become convinced of the value and effectiveness of their work amidst the daily barrage of lies.
“Fact checking has been attacked. In some parts of our politics in the U.S. and around the world, it has been turned into a dirty word,” said Katie Sanders, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, which until this week was one of the partners of the Meta fact-checking program.
“We are still in the very early stages of unraveling the consequences. But there is definitely anxiety 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 Elon Musk's “Community Notes” on X.
“Let's just label it”
Fact-checking is a routine function in the news media at least since the 1930s.
However, as social media platforms grew in popularity in the 2000s, a number of publications emerged – such as FactCheck.org and PolitiFact – devoted almost exclusively to fact-checking the statements of public figures.
However, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 turned out to be a breakthrough moment for this emerging industry.
The candidate's tendency to tell lies, coupled with concerns that social media could be used by foreign entities to manipulate public opinion, has put intense pressure on companies like Facebook to take action.
Facebook has entered into partnerships with several fact-checkers to review content flagged as potentially misleading. The program eventually expanded to approximately 130 other countries, including Canada.
“People actually 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 there were immediate challenges with the fact-checking program. They can't do it quickly and they can't necessarily do it at scale.”
These shortcomings were often a source of frustration for liberals who felt that too much misinformation was getting through. On the other hand, many conservatives felt that their content was unfairly vetted.
Republican-led response
In recent years, suspicions about fact-checking programs have turned into outright hostility.
Congressional Republicans and conservative activists have targeted The Election Integrity Partnership, a coalition of scientists and other fact-checking experts, so many legal demands that it actually stopped working last June.
Trump's pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has spent weeks attacking the fact-checking efforts of big tech companies. 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 outlets, and gave low ratings to pro-Trump outlets that spread false information about the 2020 election, such as NewsMax. (Other conservative media outlets, including Fox News and the New York Post, are rated as trustworthy.)
“Disinformation hurts everyone… whether disinformation hurts the left or the right, because it means people act with less understanding of the underlying facts than they should,” NewsGuard co-founder Gordon Crovitz, CEO of NewsGuard, said via a lifelong Republican and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
“I think this is very much a bipartisan issue. For now, it has taken on a slightly partisan tinge in the US, but I think that's passing. Trusted information is important to all parties in democracies.”
Zuckerberg gets fact-checked
Meta's decision to shut down its fact-checking program was part of a broader set of changes aimed at loosening content restrictions in the name of “freedom of speech.”
These included new policies that allow users to call LGBTQ people mentally ill or abnormal.
In a five-minute video announcing the changes, Zuckerberg claimed that Meta's fact-checkers were “too politically biased.”
He added that ending the program would “dramatically reduce the level of censorship on our platforms.”
Not surprisingly, his reasoning has come under scrutiny from fact-checkers.
They indicated that the program's partners never removed content from Meta sites. Their work only appeared as a warning attached to content that had been thoroughly reviewed.
“We have a really rigorous process for testing claims that we set out to fact-check. We have a plan on how we will learn about this topic and get a final answer,” Sanders said. “Honestly, it takes time and knowledge.”
Ultimately, according to Sanders, the decision to remove content or shut down the site rested with Meta, something the company rarely did.
Much of the daily fact-checking was 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.
“These are the very problems this program was intended to solve. It was not intended to solve political lies that are as old as humanity,” said Mantzarlis, former director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which helped Facebook establish its fact-checking program.
PolitiFact's work for Meta included correcting information about mass shootings, natural disasters and ineffective or unsafe health measures.
“I would expect the environment to become trashier when 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 crowdsourced approach used in X.
While crowdsourced fact-checking can be effective with the right incentives, X's “Community Notes” feature mainly provides a forum for further bickering between parties, Mantzarlis said.
“The particular irony of Zuckerberg throwing fact-checkers under the bus as a 'partisan' is that the alternative he proposes does not seem like a paradise for bipartisanship and Kumbaya meetings,” he said.
With great supply comes great demand
At this time, Meta is only finalizing its fact-checking program in the US. The Agence France-Presse branch provides fact-checking in Canada and continues to operate.
“This is a heavy blow to the fact-checking community and journalism. We are assessing the situation,” AFP said in a statement after Zuckerberg's announcement.
Meta was a major funder of fact-checking operations in the U.S. and its withdrawal will likely result in a reordering of the industry, Sanders said.
“But it's not something you can kill. This is something that will remain, whether the authorities like it or not,” she said.
In fact, given the endless supply of misinformation, the need for fact-checking by advertisers has never been greater, Crovitz said.
“There is a huge amount of disinformation, whether it comes from Russia, China, Iran, or whether it comes from hallucinations about generative models of artificial intelligence,” he said.
“There is a growing number of entities concerned about disinformation and wanting to make sure they are not contributing to it.”