Promoting the move as a decision to “get back to our roots,” Meta billionaire Mark Zuckerberg announced on Jan. 7 that his company was effectively surrendering a proactive role in protecting content veracity. Facebook, Instagram and Threads, Meta’s social media triumvirate, will eliminate fact-checking services, planning instead to rely on the Facebook community to police itself.
“We’re going to get rid of fact-checkers and replace them with community notes, similar to X,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, referring to the social media site once called Twitter and portraying his embrace of laissez-faire content as a victory for free expression.
Meta’s third-party content reviewing partners had included the likes of Reuters Fact Check, Australian Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and PolitiFact. These professional journalists and researchers have for years flagged dubious content for users on Facebook and other Meta social media platforms.
The Facebook founder claims that these professional fact-checkers demonstrated bias and diminished more trust than they created. If that is the case—and he has convincing evidence for it (you know, facts)—the proper response is not to get rid of fact-checking but to get better fact-checkers.
In fact, Mr. Zuckerberg’s assessment was quickly challenged by Angie Drobnic Holan, the director of the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “This decision will hurt social media users who are looking for accurate, reliable information to make decisions about their everyday lives and interactions with friends and family,” she said in a statement released on Jan. 7.
Though Facebook moderators were free to remove content based on fact-checkers’ ratings of its truthfulness, Ms. Drobnic Holan pointed out: “Fact-checking journalism has never censored or removed posts, it’s added information and context to controversial claims, and it’s debunked hoax content and conspiracy theories.”
“The fact-checkers used by Meta follow a Code of Principles requiring nonpartisanship and transparency,” she 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."
Indeed, Mr. Zuckerberg’s capitulation seems a performance intended for an audience of one, a fellow who is, not coincidentally, on his way back to Washington—four years after encouraging his followers to disrupt the last transfer of power. But Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision is likely to affect all of us. Facebook and other Meta media platforms have the power to rapidly influence opinion and shape reality.
Though the area is a new one in media studies, there are some signs that fact-checking does indeed help reduce damaging misinformation flows. An analysis of experiments in four countries—Argentina, Nigeria, South Africa and the United Kingdom—conducted by social scientists in partnership with fact-checking organizations found: “Fact-checks reduced false beliefs in all countries, with most effects detectable more than [two weeks] later and with surprisingly little variation by country.”
The dangers of Meta’s abdication are clear. Hoaxes and fantasies that quickly circulated in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene in September and October hindered the emergency response in North Carolina. Now a similar phenomenon appears at work this week as devastating wildfires continue in California. I guess we are about to find out how much more potent the swirl of misinformation during future crisis conditions will prove in the complete absence of professional verification efforts on Meta platforms.
A Princeton University study of the 2016 election found that Facebook “played a central role in spreading content from untrustworthy websites relative to other platforms”—a performance far worse than other social media platforms of the era. It reports: “Articles…that featured factually dubious claims about politics and the campaign were shared by millions of people on Facebook. Post-election surveys indicated these claims were often widely believed.”
Facebook previously hosted—and its algorithms at that time widely disseminated—some of the worst misinformation maligning the American psyche and may be the purveyor of the same again as soon as its fact-checking falls away.
You know who is not getting rid of fact-checking? The editors and journalists in the much-derided legacy media, those news sources many Americans have abandoned in exchange for an emerging mediascape of podcasting commentary and fabulism. Many actors in that new media realm are unrestrained by facts or traditions of journalistic ethics, trading in hyperbole, insinuation and thorough fabrications produced by bought-and-paid-for influencers, political operatives and assorted flim-flam artists.
I find myself unexpectedly in this hair-pulling moment in my career. Lately, when introducing myself to people as a journalist, I am greeted with smirks, suspicion or outright menace.
How did we get here? I’m still puzzling that one out. How is it possible that so many Americans have come to trust the blathering class on new media above the professionals at local and national newspapers who are still trying to commit journalism as fairly and factually as they can?
I wish I knew. Some blame what they perceive as years of slanted reporting at major papers like The New York Times (despite the grousing, still the national paper of record) or major lapses like the failure of the Catholic media to report sex abuse atrocities kept under wraps for decades by the U.S. church. Those failures were real, and they were painful, self-inflicted wounds that have to be acknowledged and addressed.
And at many old media sites, they are being addressed. There is at least the will to respond to shortcomings and failures in news-gathering in the legacy media even as other contemporary communicators blithely proceed with the distorted or dishonest news they perpetrate against their audiences.
I would like to point out to those rushing to embrace the new media and celebrating the alleged free speech about to erupt on Facebook that the vast majority of us who work in the old-school print and digital news world are honest and hard-working professionals doing the best we can to get our facts straight and our stories out as fair and square as we can make them.
Can we get things wrong? Of course. But most of us are quick to make a correction and let you know what was corrected.
Are journalists completely bias-free? No, they never were and never will be. I write about international and regional issues through Catholic, American and middle-class filters. We bring our lives and our anxieties into our reporting. We bring our hope and our desire for mercy and justice into it, too.
But if we are never truly objective, our fact-finding can be. Our reporting can be balanced. At our best, we follow a story where it leads, not toward a result we’re manufacturing.
Here’s hoping that Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision to renounce his obligation to get Meta’s facts straight may prove a pivot point for internet news consumers. It is more confirmation that social media platforms will never be reliable sources for the news and perspectives we can rely on to inform our lives.
Maybe it offers an opportunity for news consumers to re-evaluate the old media they have abandoned or, for younger people, never experienced. Local media has been mortally wounded by the loss of revenue now flowing to alternative media venues, but there are still plenty of journalists who remain on the job out there rooting out incompetence and corruption in local and national government and opening our eyes to local civic problems as well as social and geopolitical injustices.
You may disagree with something legacy journalists write, especially when it is written as opinion, but the data and information those analysis or commentary pieces are built on will be derived from primary or otherwise reliable sources. And they will be cited, and they will be traceable.
That is a standard far above what you will encounter in the content infiltrating many podcasts and other non-mainstream “news” sites, and it is part of a giant, historically significant legacy I am gratified to contribute to.
[For another perspective on Meta’s move away from fact-checking, check out: Facebook was right to ditch fact-checking—but it should learn from the limits of Elon Musk’s ‘Community Notes’]
