Meta’s fact-checking partners claim they were “blindsided” by the company’s decision to abandon third-party fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads in favor of a Community Notes model, and some say they are now scrambling to figure out if they can survive the hole this leaves in their funding.
“We heard the news just like everyone else,” says Alan Duke, cofounder and editor in chief of fact-checking site Lead Stories, which started working with Meta in 2019. “No advance notice.”
The news that Meta was no longer planning on using their services was announced in a blog post by chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan on Tuesday morning and an accompanying video from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Instead, the company plans to rely on X-style Community Notes, which allow users to flag content that they think is inaccurate or requires further explanation.
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 be applied.
“We were blindsided by this,” Jesse Stiller, the managing editor of Meta fact-checking partner Check Your Fact, tells WIRED. His organization started working with Meta in 2019, and they have 10 people working in the newsroom.“This was totally unexpected and out of left field for us. We weren’t aware this decision was being considered until Mark dropped the video overnight.”
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.
“We have no idea what the future looks like for the website going forward,” Stiller says.
Duke says Lead Stories had a diverse revenue stream and most of its operations were outside of the US, but 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.
For others the financial implications are even more dire. One editor at a US-based fact-checking organization that works with Metas, who was not authoritized to speak on the record, told WIRED that Meta’s decision “is going to eventually drain us out.”
Meta did not respond to a request to comment on its partners allegations or the financial impact its decision would have on some organizations.
“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.
Meta’s partners were also angered by Zuckerberg’s allegation that fact checkers had become too biased.
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 follows the highest standards of journalism and ethics required by the International Fact-Checking Network code of principles. We fact check without regard to where on the political spectrum a false claim originates.”
This was a viewpoint reiterated by Kristin Roberts, the chief content officer at Gannett Media, whose publication USA Today was another Meta fact-checking partner.
“Fact-based journalism is what USA Today does best,” Roberts said in an emailed statement. “Truth and facts serve everyone—not the right or the left—and that’s what we will continue to deliver.”
Many of Meta’s fact-checking partners have claimed that Zuckerberg blaming fact checkers for over-the-top censorship on the company’s platform was inaccurate, as they simply added information and context to post, leaving the final decision to take down content to Meta itself.
“To blame fact-checkers is a disappointing cop-out and it perpetuates a misunderstanding of its own program,” says Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, which owns PolitiFact and the International Fact-Checking Network. “Facts are not censorship. Fact-checkers never censored anything. And Meta always held the cards. It’s time to quit invoking inflammatory and false language in describing the role of journalists and fact-checking.”
Other fact-checkers point out that the Community Notes model, which has in the past worked poorly at X, still requires the input of experts in order to work.
“While a crowd-sourced model for content verification may work in theory, it cannot magically succeed without relying on expertise, particularly on complex scientific and technical topics,” Emmanuel Vincent, the executive director of Science Feedback, a Meta fact-checking partner, tells WIRED. “Participants in such a program will still need to rely on credible evidence sourced from fact-checking organizations, trustworthy journalism, or scientists with relevant expertise to ensure accurate assessments.”
Zuckerberg, who mentions President-elect Donald Trump on a number of occasions in his video, has been trying to build closer links to the incoming administration in recent weeks.
The Meta CEO, who donated a million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund, was a recent visitor to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, bringing with him a pair of the company’s Ray-Ban AI glasses as a gift.
Zuckerberg’s decision last week to promote Kaplan, a former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, was widely seen as an effort to appease the incoming administration—as was Meta’s decision this week to appoint UFC CEO and close Trump ally Dana White, to its board.
Now some of Meta’s fact-checking partners see the decision to abandon third-party fact checkers and implement an X-style Community Notes model as another effort to appease Trump.
“It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters,” Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said in an emailed statement. “Fact-checkers have not been biased in their work—that attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”
Additional reporting by Brian Barrett.
Source : Wired
