Fact-checkers in Latin America are bracing for Meta’s next moves
Facebook Fact-Checking to Rethink Misperceptions about False Claims: A Social Psychotherapist Says: The Impact of Fact Checking on Human Perceptions
In terms of helping to convince people that information is true and trustworthy, “fact checking does work”, says Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, UK, who acted as an unpaid adviser on Facebook’s fact-checking programme in 2022. “Studies provide very consistent evidence that fact-checking does at least partially reduce misperceptions about false claims.”
The company said that the move was to counter fact checkers bias. “Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how,” Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan wrote on 7 January.
Nature spoke to researchers about the value of fact-checking, where biases might come from and what Meta’s decision might mean.
“Ideally, we’d want people to not form misperceptions in the first place,” adds van der Linden. “But if we have to work with the fact that people are already exposed, then reducing it is almost as good as it as it’s going to get.”
Alexios Mantzarlis is a former fact-checker and director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech in New York City.
On Facebook, articles and posts deemed false by fact-checkers are currently flagged with a warning. They are also shown to fewer users by the platform’s suggestion algorithms, Mantzarlis says, and people are more likely to ignore flagged content than to read and share it.
Kate Starbird, who is a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle, believes that flagging posts could have an effect on other users that are not captured by studies of the effectiveness of fact checks. She notes that measuring the direct effect on user beliefs is different from measuring the effects of fact-checks in the information ecosystems.
The stuff that is being spread is conservative misinformation. In the US, when a single party spreads most of the misinformation, it is likely that the fact-checks will be biased.
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 allegations of child kidnapping in Mexico and other Latin American countries. The Covid-19 epidemic came after. Independent fact-checkers debunking ideas such as “drinking bleach eliminates the virus” and “5G networks cause the Pandemic” by using available data.
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. The network was trust by Meta and had its own requirements. Among them: Political discourse or any type of content that was classified as an opinion could not be refuted. A racist anti- immigrant discourse strengthened after the first migrant caravan, which crossed Mexico in the first year ofAMLO’s six-year term, due to misinformation.
The program ended in the United States on January 7th, but everything changed before that. It is thought that within the next few years the initiative will be gone in Latin America and the rest of the world, harming the news organizations that depend 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?
The project was first implemented in the United States and then in the rest of the world. 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.”
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 CEO of Meta, now called Facebook, was up at night due to the problem of fake news. 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 platform’s influence on political landscape was being addressed and US lawmakers demanded protection of democracy. Eventually, he would appear before the Senate.
