When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that the social media giant would end third-party fact-checking and make it easier to moderate sensitive topics, he said the decision reflected the zeitgeist.
The re-election of US President-elect Donald Trump signaled a “cultural tipping point” towards free speech over moderation, Zuckerberg said.
He was right in many ways.
Less than a decade after the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit prompted US tech platforms to crack down on online misinformation, the momentum has shifted dramatically in favor of voices pushing for a less regulated, freer internet.
“This move by Meta is definitely part of a larger trend, with fact-checking facing issues globally,” John P Wihbey, associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University in Canada, told Al Jazeera.
“I think the changes are driven as much by political change as by business necessity, as news organizations also need to shift scarce resources to serve audiences in other ways.”
If not over, the period of formal fact-checking initiatives at least appears to be receding.
After tripling in less than a decade, the number of active fact-checking projects worldwide will peak in 2022 at 457, according to data compiled by the Duke Reporters’ Lab.
Even Google searches for the terms “fact-checking” and “disinformation” hit their high watermarks in 2020 and 2022, respectively, according to an analysis of search data by statistician and US election forecaster Nate Silver.
For fact-checking projects that have so far survived financial and political problems, Meta’s move raises questions about their continued viability as many of the initiatives have relied on funding from the tech giant.
Meta has spent $100 million between 2016 and 2022 supporting fact-checking programs certified by the International Fact-Checking Network, according to the company.
Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, Elon Musk, one of Trump’s most powerful allies, pulled the political center of X, formerly Twitter, sharply to the right and touted the platform’s bona fides—anything goes.
Liking Trump
Disinformation experts condemned Meta’s move and accused Zuckerberg of pandering to Trump — who often accuses Big Tech and legacy media of colluding with his liberal opponents — just as he prepares to take office.
“I see Meta’s decision as part of a widespread move among American corporations to preemptively submit to Trump’s expected demands, which of course will include an attempt to abolish the very notion of not just fact-checking, but the existence of facts,” Stephan Lewandowsky, a professor, told Al Jazeera in psychology from the University of Bristol who studies disinformation.
“It’s a standard move in the autocrat’s book because it eliminates any possibility of accountability and prevents evidence-based debate.”
But for conservatives in the US, the change serves as vindication of their long-standing complaints that fact-checking initiatives and content moderation decisions are heavily skewed in favor of liberal viewpoints.
In a 2019 Pew poll, 70 percent of Republicans said they believed fact-checkers favored one side over another, compared with 29 percent of Democrats and 47 percent of independents.
In his announcement, Zuckerberg himself expressed such concerns, arguing that “fact checkers have simply been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the US.”
Drawing on Musk’s playbook, he said Meta will gradually roll out a “community notes” system similar to that used by X, where explanatory notes are added to disputed posts based on user consensus.
Zuckerburg also gave credence to conservative complaints about content moderation by promising to remove restrictions on topics such as immigration and gender that are “just out of touch with mainstream discourse.”
“What started as a movement for greater inclusivity has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and exclude people with different ideas, and it has gone too far,” he said.
Fact-checking organizations rejected accusations of liberal bias and emphasized that platforms like Meta have always been the ultimate arbiters of how to handle content deemed disinformation.
“Fact-checking journalism has never censored or removed posts; adds information and context to controversial claims and debunks false content and conspiracy theories,” Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday.
Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches misinformation and misinformation, said arguments about the alleged bias of fact-checking initiatives are made in bad faith.
“In any healthy democratic discourse, you want people to publicly present evidence for what statements and claims to believe and what not to believe, and of course it’s always up to you to make a judgment call whether to believe what you hear,” Graves told Al Jazeera.
“We want journalists and fact-checkers to do their best to determine what is true and what is not in a political discourse that is often filled with information from a variety of sources across the political spectrum,” Graves added.
There is research showing that fact-checkers, such as journalists, are generally disproportionately left-leaning in their politics, though it’s hard to say how that might affect their determinations.
In a 2023 survey of 150 disinformation experts worldwide by the Harvard Kennedy School, 126 were identified as “slightly left-of-center,” “quite left,” or “very left.”
At the same time, various studies also suggest that right-leaning audiences are more sensitive to misinformation than their liberal peers.
Some critics of fact-checking groups, like Silver, founder of the election forecasting website FiveThirtyEight, have argued that fact-checkers too often focus on edge cases or claims that can’t be proven one way or another because of their liberal leanings.
“Biden’s age questioning was one such example,” Silver wrote on his Substack on Thursday, referring to speculation about US President Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive health before his decision to drop out of the 2024 presidential race.
“Although clearly an appropriate subject for journalistic investigation, claims that the White House covered up Biden’s shortcomings have often been treated as ‘conspiracy’ theories, even though subsequent reporting has confirmed them.”
Wihbey, a professor at Northeastern University, said that while fact-checking initiatives have limitations in their ability to resolve all disagreements about the truth, they exemplify counter-speech that is crucial to democratic and open societies.
“It is true that in many issues there are conflicts of values, not just facts, and it is difficult for fact-checkers to make a firm judgment about which side is right. But in almost all circumstances, good, rigorous, knowledge-based journalism can add context and make additional relevant points around the issues being discussed,” he said.
“The ideal speech situation in a democratic society is one in which opposing viewpoints clash and the truth prevails.”
Although studies have shown that fact-checking efforts can have a positive effect on countering misinformation, the effect appears to be modest, not least because of the vast amount of information on the Internet.
A 2023 mega-study of about 33,000 participants in the US found that warning labels and digital literacy education improved participants’ ability to correctly judge headlines as true or false—but only by about 5-10 percent.
Donald Kimball, editor of Tech Exchange at the Washington Policy Institute, an affiliate of the conservative State Policy Network, said that fact-checking initiatives have in many cases failed to change opinion in the same way that banning Trump from major social media platforms did not cause his followers to disappear.
“I think in the new media economy, ‘fact checking’ ideas don’t kill anymore,” Kimball told Al Jazeera.
“Maybe in legacy media it was easy to destroy all alternative narratives, but now people can see a group of individuals who agree with them. You are no longer crazy to disagree with fact-checking when you see other groups and communities oppose it. I also think people are tired of being told that what they see in front of them is wrong.”
As for the future of fact-checking initiatives?
Wihbey said the history of the media is replete with new forms of journalism that have come and gone in response to changing social, cultural and political circumstances.
“Maybe the fact-checking movement will reinvent itself in new ways, but the exact media form and branding will change — maybe it’s not called ‘fact-checking’ anymore,” he said.
“What I hope we won’t lose is the desire in journalism to follow empirical reality as much as humanly possible. This does not mean some kind of arrogance and the feeling that journalism has all the answers. But I think a pragmatic empirical approach—one that says we’re open to changing minds—and that looks for coherence in fact patterns and embraces open debate is the right stance for professional journalism.”
