Meta’s fact checking partners claim they were deceived by the decision to axe them

The First Fact-Checking Partnership in the U.S. Will Move to California to Support a Fair and Equality Right-Wise Media Advertising Policy

“Meta finally admits to censoring speech…what a great birthday present to wake up to and a huge win for free speech,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) posted on X on Monday.

The fact-checking programs on social media have helped to reduce hoax content and conspiracy theories. Holan said that it was disappointing to see it so quickly cut in half.

“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.

“It was particularly troubling to see him echo claims of bias against the fact checkers because he knows that the ones that participated in his program were signatories of a code of principles that requires that they be transparent and nonpartisan,” said Bill Adair, co-founder of the International Fact Checking Network. He founded PolitiFact, one of the first participants in Facebook’s third party fact checker’s program, which he left in 2020.

Meta said that it would change how it enforces its policies, relying less on automated systems, except for terrorism, child sexual exploitation, and fraud. The company’s U.S. content moderation team will move from California to Texas. The move should help develop trust in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.

Meta should not be a third-party fact checker, but instead a community notes platform for the prevention of false narratives on social media

“So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said.

Meta said instead of working with third-party fact checkers, it would shift to a “community notes” program where users write and rate notes that appear next to specific posts. That’s similar to the approach Elon Musk has championed on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Zuckerberg said his views on content moderation have changed. Meta has made “too many mistakes” in how it applied its content policies, he said, and pointed to Trump’s election to a second term as “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”

Content moderation was seen as a form of censorship by conservatives after the 2020 election. Facebook, along with Twitter and YouTube, banned Trump from their platforms after the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, but eventually allowed him to return ahead of his second run for office. In recent years, fact checkers, researchers of false narratives, and social media content moderation programs have become targets of Republican-led Congressional probes and legal challenges.

Meta set up one of the most extensive partnerships with fact checkers after the 2016 presidential election, in which Russia spread false claims on Facebook and other online platforms. The company created what has become a standard for how tech platforms limit the spread of falsehoods and misleading information.

For others the financial implications are even more dire. The editor of a fact-checking organization in the US who was not authorized to speak on the record told WIRED that Meta’s decision is going to eventually drain them out.

Duke says Lead Stories has a diverse revenue stream and most of its operations are outside of the US, but he 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.

“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. There was 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. X-styleCommunity Notes will allow users to flag content that they think is inaccurate or requires further explanation.