Meta’s Breakup With US Fact-Checkers

Move to close them down could threaten a worldwide industry and democracy as well

By: Tita C. Valderama

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sudden January 7 announcement to end third party fact-checking in the United States leaves more than 130 overseas organizations concerned that they will follow, ending reliable checking of postings on Facebook – which has a staggering 3.07 billion monthly active users, 38.3 percent of the global population. Fact-checking will also end on Threads and Instagram, he said. The fact-checkers have the crucial job of eliminating untruthful or biased entries on Facebook and other social media platforms in more than 80 countries worldwide.

Zuckerberg thus rescinds policies in place since 2016 to address the spread of falsehoods, misleading claims, manipulation, and conspiracy theories in an apparent effort to get himself off Donald Trump’s enemies list – indeed, Trump himself said the move was "probably" motivated by his threats. Trump reclaims the White House on January 20.

Fact-checkers, Zuckerberg said, “have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created, especially in the US,” and that fact-checking “has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and shut out people with different ideas, and it's gone too far,” a comment that has infuriated members of what has become a thriving industry seeking to correct the world’s lies.

Zuckerberg’s reliance on independent fact-checkers came into being in the wake of a major scandal when personal data belonging to 87 million Facebook users was collected by the British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica for political advertising without informing the users to assist the 2016 presidential campaigns of Ted Cruz and Donald Trump. Facebook was fined US$5 billion by the Federal Trade Commission due to privacy violations and another £500,000 by the UK Information Commissioner's Office. In May 2018, Cambridge Analytica filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Zuckerberg apologized to the US Congress for Facebook’s role in the data harvesting.

Fact-checkers outside the US have been told that Zuckerberg’s announcement has “no impact” on their coverage “at this time,” although many expect that their existing contracts with Meta would be the last. Some are uncertain about their future while others are seeking alternatives to survive. One of them is VERA Files, formed in 2008 to take a deeper look into Philippine issues, one of the most important fact-checkers in the Philippines and the earliest of Meta's third-party fact-checking programs, tracking and debunking false claims and misleading statements by public officials and figures since 2016 with support from the US government’s National Endowment of Democracy and other philanthropic organizations.

VERA Files, which employs around 15 veteran journalists, is one of four organizations in the Philippines along with the award-winning news portal Rappler, PressOne.PH and MindaNews that are affiliated with the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), a subsidiary of the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, a nonprofit journalism school and research organization in St. Petersburg, Florida. The institute is one of the US’s most respected journalism institutions and has no connections to any government despite assertions about fact-checkers involved with Facebook or other social media programs.

“We recognize the harder challenge with this development and we take this as an opportunity to be more innovative and effective in doing our job of empowering the public with accurate information to meaningfully participate in the governance of the country,” said veteran Filipino journalist Ellen Tordesillas, president of VERA Files. But, she said, it is obnoxious that Zuckerberg equates fact-checking with censorship and accused fact-checkers of political bias.

All of Meta’s third-party fact-checking partners must adhere to the IFCN’s Code of Principles, including commitments of nonpartisanship and fairness; transparency of sources, funding and organization, and methodology; and open and honest corrections policy. Partners identify, review, and rate viral mis- and disinformation content such as videos, images, links, and text-only posts across Meta’s social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads). They do not remove content from the platforms. Meta does, when the content violates its Community Standards and Ads policies, such as hate speech, fake accounts, and terrorist content.

There are dozens of such fact-checking organizations across Asia affiliated with the International Fact-Checking Network, with 14, for instance, in India. There are others stretching across the region from Singapore to Pakistan to Nepal to South Korea to Taiwan to Bangladesh. How important they have become is exemplified by a 2023 study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that found 53 percent of Americans, and presumably the same percentage across the world, get at least some of their news from social media. Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok have all become pseudo-news platforms and, the study found, fake news can spread up to 10 times faster than true reporting on social media. The traditional mainstream media, which rely on assiduous fact checking, today occupy perhaps no more than 10 percent of the information spectrum.

“When explosive, misinforming posts go viral, their corrections are never as widely viewed or believed,” the MIT story said. There is nowhere that this is more true than in the Philippines, where “trolls” earning anywhere from PHP 30,000 to PHP100,000 (USS$512 to US$1,709) monthly are considered to have played a major role in the 2020 election of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. There are “troll farms” not only in the Philippines but in China, Russia and many other countries playing a similar role.

In fact, the industry, which considers itself a major bulwark against false information, isn’t happy with Meta’s implementation of its own policies in combating disinformation. At the annual meeting of the world’s fact-checkers in Sarajevo in June last year, speakers harshly criticized Meta and YouTube for doing little to stop the flow of mis- and disinformation in their platforms and even encouraging creators and peddlers by monetizing content, including scams, hoaxes, and deceptive ads.

“Nine years ago, we wrote to you about the real-world harms caused by false information on Facebook. In response, Meta created a fact-checking program that helped protect millions of users from hoaxes and conspiracy theories,” IFCN wrote. “This week, you announced you’re ending that program in the United States because of concerns about ‘too much censorship’ — a decision that threatens to undo nearly a decade of progress in promoting accurate information online.”

“This is false, and we want to set the record straight, both for today’s context and for the historical record.” IFCN said, citing Meta’s requirement for all fact-checking partners to meet “ strict nonpartisanship standards through verification.”

"What you're seeing on social media is a mob, and a mob creates a chilling effect. A mob changes reality," Rappler publisher Maria Ressa, in her opening remarks at the opening of the GlobalFact 11 conference. Meta's business model shifted when it "commoditized the people and the content." While thanking the tech companies for funding fact-checking, Ressa also called on them "to literally do something right now to protect democracy, to prevent genocide."

Tita Valderama is affiliated with VERA Files