Meta’s Fact-Checking Partners say they were blindsided by the decision
Meta Changed its Content Policy Policies in the Aftermath of the 2016 Presidential Election: Why Do Social Media Users Have a Role in Political/Critical Issues?
It was the decision of Meta to stop third-party fact-checking on social media that has left them scrambling to figure out if they can survive.
Echoing comments Mark Zuckerberg made last year, Kaplan said that Meta’s content moderation policies had been put in place not to protect users but “partly in response to societal and political pressure to moderate content.”
Kaplan said that they would allow more speech by lifting restrictions on certain topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations.
In a video accompanying the post, the Meta CEO said that the policy changes would lead to more political content returning to people’s feeds and posts on other issues that have caused culture wars in the US.
“We’re going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg said.
Meta was criticized for being too hands off in moderation of content related to high profile elections around the globe.
Kaplan also blasted fact-checking experts for their “biases and perspectives” which led to over-moderation: “Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate,” Kaplan wrote.
However WIRED reported last year that dangerous content like medical misinformation has flourished on the platform while groups like anti-government militias have utilized Facebook to recruit new members.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, content moderation policies were put in place by Facebook. The legacy media wrote about how a threat to democracy was when Trump first got elected. We tried to address those concerns without becoming arbiters of truth but the fact checkers have destroyed more trust than they have created.
Moving Meta to New York: Building trust with AI-assisted Fact Checking and the Detection of False Claims
In a bid to remove bias, Zuckerberg said Meta’s in-house trust and safety team would be moving from California to Texas, which is also now home to X’s headquarters. While we work to promote free expression, I think that will help us build trust in places where there isn’t as much concern about the biases of our teams.
Duke finds it difficult to agree with Mark Zuckerman, who says that the organizations in Meta’s US third-party fact-checking program are too politically biased. Let me check that out. 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.”
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.
Duke claims that the decision would still have an impact on Lead Stories since most operations are outside of the US. “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 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 it has 10 people working in the newsroom. This was completely out of left field for us. We weren’t aware that the decision was being considered until Mark dropped the video.
