It was 2016, and the problem of fake news kept Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (then called Facebook), up at night. The young entrepreneur was under pressure from the media and was also constantly questioned by the US legal system. The Cambridge Analytica case, accusations of Russian interference in the elections, and Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential race raised serious concerns. For the first time, the question of the platform’s influence on the political landscape was being addressed—US lawmakers demanded that the company “protect democracy.” Eventually, Zuckerberg would appear before the Senate in 2018.
As part of his counteroffensive, the company created the Third Party Fact-Checkers, or Independent Fact-checkers, program to address misinformation on its platforms.
The History of Independent Fact-Checkers at Facebook
First implemented in the United States and then in the rest of the world, the project seemed to be working. So far, according to its own data, there were more than 100 international organizations actively participating in it. Indeed, last year, in the context of the European Union parliamentary elections, Meta announced the effectiveness of its labeling system: “Between July and December 2023, for example, nearly 68 million posts on Facebook and Instagram had fact-checking labels. When something was labeled as false or misleading, 95 percent of people did not click on the content.”
But everything changed on January 7, when Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of the program in the United States. It seems only a matter of time before the initiative disappears in Latin America and the rest of the world, undermining independent news organizations that depend, to a greater or lesser extent, on that funding. Among those who would be affected will be Animal Político in Mexico; Chequeado in Argentina; Agencia Lupa or Aos Fatos in Brazil; and Maldita.es in Spain. Why get rid of something that was working, according to the company itself?
How Does Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checker Program Work?
I was an editorial supervisor at Animal Político’s El Sabueso when Meta approached us to start the project. To be part of it, you had to join the Poynter Institute certification, an international organization funded by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), which set the editorial rules for verifying information with a highly rigorous and transparent code of principles. Meta trusted this network for the project, and also had its own requirements. Among them: Political discourse or any type of content that was classified as an opinion could not be refuted. Statements by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) could not be questioned, for example, but misinformation about the first migrant caravan, which crossed Mexico in the first year of AMLO’s six-year term (2018) and which strengthened a racist anti-immigrant discourse, could be.
The “news” that was being debunked was photos or videos taken out of context, such as one that falsely claimed that a group of migrants had hijacked a truck in Chiapas. There were also lies about alleged kidnappings of children in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic. Independent fact-checkers took on a leading role in debunking, with the available data, ideas such as “drinking bleach eliminates the virus” or “5G networks caused the pandemic.”
Fact-checking outlets would argue that something was false, and then Facebook’s tool would not remove the original content but would instead add a label such as “False: Verified by Animal Político,” or another one of the network’s organizations. Meta claimed that once a post received the label, its reach was drastically reduced. “We know that this program is working and that users find value in the labels after a fact-checker rates them,” reads an official Meta post. Zuckerberg’s company always said that it would not be an “arbitrator of truth;” that was why it did not delete the original posts, showing confidence in the IFCN organizations that did this work.
This 180-degree change is a response to Donald Trump’s imminent second presidential term and to the methods of the competition, such as X’s Community Notes. Meta decided not to invest any more money in its program. Now, it hopes that Facebook and Instagram users themselves will be the ones to decide what content is disinformation or not.
In the statement where Zuckerberg announced that he will dismantle the program, he said that fact-checkers succumbed to political bias, destroying more trust than they’d created in the US. However, for Laura Zommer, former director of Chequeado (one of the most important Spanish-speaking verifier organizations) and LatamChequea, and now leader of Factchequeado (a verification media aimed at the Latino community in the US), Zuckerberg’s statements are not a surprise, and he does not have scientific evidence for his claims. “Far from censoring, fact-checkers add context,” Zommer says. “We never advocate for removing content. We want citizens to have better information to make their own decisions.”
Zommer, who is skeptical of how the dissolution of this program might benefit Meta, emphasizes that the company contradicts itself by ending the fact-checking program, especially because it has highlighted its positive results in the past. Zommer also agrees with Angie Drobnic Holan, current director of IFCN, who, in a LinkedIn post, wrote: “It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters. Factcheckers 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.”
As Trump, just days away from his inauguration, threatens a mass deportation of migrants, the Hispanic community is facing a possible new wave of disinformation. “The evidence makes us think this will be bad. Until it is implemented we will see, but we can say that, during the Trump campaign, one of the main disinformation narratives was against migrants, such as those that said migrants would commit fraud. That was false. The data from the past makes us think that this decision is likely to negatively affect Latino communities in the US,” Zommer tells WIRED en Español.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric is not the only thing endangering the ecosystem. In an age where deepfake video and audio scams are spreading, having viable information will be a priority.
The Latin American news ecosystem, with its economic vulnerability, is at risk. “Facebook’s fact-checker program payments were still keeping fact-checking organizations and news organizations with a fact-checking section afloat. So I think that, most likely, if these organizations don’t manage to diversify soon, many of them are going to disappear,” says Pablo Medina, disinformation research editor at the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, CLIP.
While the decision applies only to the US for now, the disappearance of the project has raised alarm in the Hispanic media ecosystem. “The attack expressed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on what he called ‘secret courts’ that promote censorship of the platform in Latin America—a false claim—indicates that Brazil is a key focus of the company’s concerns,” says Tai Nalon, CEO of Aos Fatos, one of the most important fact-checking media in the global south.
“This is completely in line with the rhetoric of Donald Trump, a regular detractor of journalism and fact-checking,” Nalon says. “The arguments used by Zuckerberg have been widely exploited by the far right around the world to delegitimize effective initiatives against disinformation. Since there has never been dissatisfaction with the work of fact-checkers before, this seems to me to be a move aimed at gaining some political advantage. We know that Meta is facing antitrust cases in the US, and being close to the government could be an advantage for the company.”
Meanwhile, as Laura Zommer says, evidence from the past gives the news ecosystem reason to worry.
WIRED en español contacted Meta for this story. Through a media representative, the company replied with the statement (in Spanish) of the decision and said that this does not apply to WhatsApp and is only for US verifiers.
This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.
Source : Wired
