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    Jan. 7, 2025, 2:46 p.m.
    “A hard hit for the fact-checking community and journalism”: Meta eliminates fact-checking in the U.S.
    LINK: www.facebook.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Sarah Scire   |   January 7, 2025

    Meta will replace its third-party fact-checking program in the U.S. with a crowd-sourced community notes program similar to the one used by X, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on his Facebook page on Tuesday morning. The wide-ranging video message framed the decision as a move to “dramatically reduce the amount of censorship” on Facebook, Instagram, and X.

    Zuckerberg and Meta’s new global policy chief Joel Kaplan — who gave an exclusive interview to Fox News — both put blame on journalists and fact-checkers for the change.

    “We tried, in good faith, to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth, but the fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.,” Zuckerberg said in the video announcement.

    “We’re eliminating the third-party fact-checking system. [It was] well-intentioned at the outset, but there’s just been too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check and how,” Kaplan said from the “Fox and Friends” couch on Tuesday morning.

    Kaplan added, “The idea was [that] they were independent fact-checkers, but they’ve just been too biased.”

    Zuckerberg and Kaplan did not provide examples of the fact-checks they thought were biased or elaborate on how they think fact-checkers have destroyed trust. In a Facebook blog post, Kaplan wrote, “Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives…Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate.”

    As recently as 2022, Meta was bragging that it had invested more than $100 million into fact-checking. But there have been signs the company has been looking to cut back on independent fact-checking. The Associated Press confirmed its fact-checking agreement with Meta ended back January 2024. The site factcheck.org — which lists its donors and grants publicly — saw its funding from Meta drop from $339,279 in 2023 to $162,800 in 2024.

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    Though news organizations have sought to turn fact-checking into a reliable revenue stream, the consensus has been that there are few buyers outside a handful of Big Tech companies. In 2022, Meta provided nearly half — 45.2% — of total funding for fact-checking, according to Poynter. (Poynter is home to the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) as well as Politifact — one of the 10 fact-checking partners in the U.S. affected by the announcement.) Meta’s fact-checking program has been the leading income source for fact-checking organizations that participate in it, according to a State of the Fact-Checkers Report released April 2024.

    The fact-checking field, which experienced rapid growth for nearly 15 years, began to level off in 2021, according to the Duke Reporters’ Lab, which has produced an annual census of fact-checkers since 2014. Two years later, in 2023, fact-checking teams declined for the first time.

    “Our latest count showed as many as 457 fact-checking projects in 111 countries were active over the past two years,” the Duke report notes. “But so far in 2024, that number has shrunk to 439.”

    Despite some of these warning signs, Meta scrapping the fact-checking operation entirely in the U.S. — and suggesting it would do the same in additional countries — was a surprise to many.

    A spokesperson for the Agence France-Presse (AFP) — a long-time partner of Facebook that runs the world’s biggest network of fact-checkers — said the news organization learned the news on Tuesday as everyone else.

    “It’s a hard hit for the fact-checking community and journalism,” AFP said in a statement. “We’re assessing the situation.”

    Other partners pushed back on some of the critical statements Meta executives made in announcing the end of the fact-checking program. Maarten Schenk, co-founder and chief operating officer of Lead Stories, said the fact-checking site has been part of the Meta Third-Party Fact-Checking Partnership since 2019. The organization was “surprised and disappointed” to first learn about the end of the partnership through media reports.

    “In all the years we have been part of the partnership, we or the IFCN never received any complaints from Meta about any political bias, so we were quite surprised by this statement,” Schenk noted.

    Angie Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network and a 2023 Nieman fellow, said Meta’s decision “will hurt social media users who are looking for accurate, reliable information.”

    “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,” Holan said in a statement. “The fact-checkers used by Meta follow a Code of Principles requiring nonpartisanship and transparency. It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters. Fact-checkers 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.”

    Aaron Sharockman, executive director of PolitiFact, said in a statement that the “decision has nothing to do with free speech or censorship.”

    The European Fact-Checking Standards Network also took issue with Zuckerberg’s justification for ending the U.S. program and called his statements “patently false.”

    “Fact-checkers are held to the highest journalistic standards of non-biased reporting, transparency, integrity and accountability, with organisations like the EFCSN upholding these standards through an independently conducted audit,” the EFCSN wrote in a press release. “Linking fact-checking with censorship is especially harmful as such false claims are already one of the driving forces behind harassment and attacks on fact-checkers.”

    Meta also announced Tuesday that it plans to loosen its filters that automatically flag certain offensive speech and recommend more political news.

    “[The rules have] just become too restrictive over time about what people can say, including about those kind of sensitive topics … that people want to discuss and debate — immigration, trans issues, gender,” Kaplan said. “If you can say it on TV, if you can say it on the floor of Congress, [then] you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship.” (Wired reported that the updated “hateful conduct” policy now allows users to say gay and trans people have “mental illness” and permits referring to “women as household objects or property.”)

    In his own video, Zuckerberg said Meta has started to “get feedback that people want to see [political] content again.”

    “For a while the community asked to see less politics because it was making people stressed, so we stopped recommending these posts,” he said, “but it feels like we’re in a new era now.”

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