Fact-checking firm staffed by CNN alums hits out at Met: ‘surprised and disappointed’

A prominent fact-checking organization used by Facebook to moderate political content reacted to news that it would revamp its fact-checking to better avoid bias with an article expressing its disappointment and disagreement with the move.

“Lead Stories was surprised and disappointed to first learn through media reports and press releases of the end of Meta’s third-party fact-checking partnership that Lead Stories has been a part of since 2019,” Lead Stories Editor Maarten Schenk he wrote on Tuesday in response to Meta’s announcement that it would significantly change its fact-checking process to “restore freedom of expression.”

Lead Stories, a Facebook fact-checker that employs several former CNN alumni, including Alan Duke and Ed Payne, has become one of the more prominent fact-checkers used by Facebook in recent years.

Fox News Digital first reported on Tuesday that Meta is ending its fact-checking program and lifting speech restrictions to “restore freedom of expression” on Facebook, Instagram and the Meta platforms, acknowledging that its current content moderation practices “have gone too far.”

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“After Trump was first elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation is a threat to democracy,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video message Tuesday. “We tried in good faith to address these issues without becoming the arbiters of the truth. But the fact-checkers were simply too politically biased and destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the US.”

“What political bias?” the article from Lead Stories asks before explaining that “it’s disappointing to hear Mark Zuckerberg accuse the organizations in Meta’s US third-party fact-checking program of being ‘too politically biased’.”

“Especially because one of the conditions imposed by Meta to participate in the partnership included being a verified signatory to IFCN’s Code of Principles, which specifically requires a ‘commitment to impartiality and integrity,'” the article states. “In all the years we have been part of the partnership, we or IFCN have never received any complaints from Meta about any political bias, so we were quite surprised by this statement.”

The meta said in its announcement that it would be moving towards a moderation system more in line with Community Notes on X, which Lead Stories didn’t seem to have a problem with.

“However, in our experience and that of others, community notes on Xu are often slow to appear, sometimes completely inaccurate, and unlikely to appear on controversial posts due to the inability to reach agreement [sic] or consensus among users,” Lead Stories wrote. “Ultimately, truth cares little about consensus or agreement: the shape of the Earth remains the same even if social media users can’t agree on it.”

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Lead Stories added that Community Notes is “totally non-transparent about its contributors: readers are left to speculate about their bias, funding, allegiance, sources or expertise, and no avenues for appeals or corrections,” while “fact checkers, on the other hand, IFCN requires them to be completely transparent about who they are, who funds them, and what methodology and sources they use to reach their conclusions.”

Schenk added: “Fact-checking is adding verified information from sources so people can decide what to believe. It’s an essential part of free speech.”

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Duke said Lead Stories plans to continue.

“Lead Stories will continue, although we have to reduce our production without the support of Meta,” said Duke. “We are global, with most of our business outside the US. We publish in eight languages ​​other than English, which will be affected.”

Some conservatives took to social media to blast Lead Stories over their article lamenting the change in Meta after years of conservative rejection of Facebook’s fact-checkers as a whole on key news stories, including suppression bombshell coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“Of all the fact-checking companies, Lead Stories is the worst,” British-American conservative writer Ian Haworth published on X. “I couldn’t be happier that they’ll soon be circling the drain.”

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CEO of Politifact, a fact-checking tool also used by Facebook, uttered a fierce rebuke Zuckerberg after Tuesday’s announcement.

“If Meta is upset that it created a censorship tool, it should look in the mirror,” Aaron Sharockman said in a statement posted on X after Zuckerberg’s announcement.

Sharockman fumed: “The decision to remove independent journalists from Facebook’s content moderation program in the United States has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. Mark Zuckerberg’s decision could not be less subtle.”

He rejected Zuckerberg’s accusation of political bias, saying that Meta’s platforms, not fact-checkers, are the entities that actually censored posts.

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“Let me be clear: The decision to remove or penalize a post or account is made by Meta and Facebook, not the fact-checkers. They created the rules,” Sharockman said.

At the end of his Lead Stories post, Schenk wrote, “While we’re obviously disappointed by this news, Lead Stories wants to thank the many people at Meta we’ve worked with over the years and will continue our fact-checking mission. To paraphrase the tagline on our main page: ‘ Just because it’s trending now without a fact-check tag still doesn’t make it true.'”

Fox News Digital’s Gabriel Hays and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.