Meta's move to end fact-checking reflects a turn toward a free Internet | Elections

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that the social media giant would eliminate third-party fact-checking and ease the moderation of sensitive topics, he described the decision as reflecting the zeitgeist.

The re-election of United States President-elect Donald Trump signals a “cultural tipping point” toward free speech over moderation, Zuckerberg said.

In many ways he was right.

Less than a decade after the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit prompted US tech platforms to crack down on misinformation online, the momentum has shifted dramatically in favor of voices arguing for a less regulated, freer internet.

“This move by Meta is definitely part of a larger trend, with fact-checking becoming increasingly difficult globally,” John P told Al Jazeera. Whigby, associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University in Canada.

“My sense is that the changes are driven equally by political change and business necessity, as news organizations also need to shift scarce resources to serve audiences in other ways.”

If not over, the era of official fact-checking initiatives at least appears to be in retreat.

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 weathered financial and political headwinds, Meta's move raises questions about their continued viability, as many initiatives have relied on funding from the tech giant.

Meta has spent $100 million between 2016 and 2022. in support of 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, has pulled X's political hub, formerly Twitter, sharply to the right and touted the bona fides of the “anything goes” platform.

Suiting Trump

Disinformation experts condemned Metta's move and accused Zuckerberg of reaching out to Trump — who often accuses big tech and legacy media of being in cahoots with his liberal opponents — just as he is about to take office.

“I believe Meta's decision is part of a widespread movement among corporate America to preemptively submit to Trump's expected demands, which of course will include an attempt to eliminate the very notion not only of fact-checking, but of the existence of facts, Stefan Lewandowski, a professor of psychology at the University of Bristol who studies disinformation, told Al Jazeera.

“This is a standard move in the autocrat's playbook because it eliminates any possibility of accountability and precludes 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 study 70 percent of Republicans said they believe fact-checkers favor one side over the other, compared with 29 percent of Democrats and 47 percent of independents, respectively.

In his announcement, Zuckerberg himself expressed similar concerns, claiming that “the fact-checkers were simply too politically biased and destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the US.”

Taking a leaf out of Musk's book, he said Meta will introduce a “community notes” system similar to that used by X, where explanatory notes are added to controversial posts based on user consensus.

Zuckerberg also lent credence to conservative complaints about content moderation, promising to remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are “simply outside of the mainstream discourse.”

“What started as a movement for greater inclusion has increasingly been used to shut down opinions and people with different ideas, and it has gone too far,” he said.

Fact-checking organizations rejected accusations of liberal bias and stressed that platforms like Meta have always been the final arbiters of how to deal with content deemed misinformation.

“Fact-checking journalism has never censored or removed posts; it adds information and context to controversial claims and debunks fraudulent content and conspiracy theories,” said Angie Drobnich Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday.

Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies misinformation and misinformation, said the arguments about the alleged bias of fact-checking initiatives are made in bad faith.

“In any healthy democratic discourse, you want people to publicly offer evidence about what statements and what claims should be believed and what should not be believed, and of course it's always up to you to decide whether to believe what you hear,” Graves said in front of Al Jazeera.

“We want journalists and fact-checkers to make every effort to determine what is true and what is not in a political discourse that is often filled with information from all kinds of sources across the political spectrum,” Graves added.

There is research showing that fact-checkers, like journalists, are generally disproportionately left-leaning in their politics, though it's hard to say how that might affect their decisions.

In a survey of 150 disinformation experts worldwide by the Harvard Kennedy School in 2023, 126 of them were identified as “slightly left-of-center,” “relatively left,” or “very left.”

At the same time, various studies also suggest that right-wing audiences are more susceptible to misinformation than their liberal counterparts.

Some critics of fact-checking groups, such as Silver, the founder of the election prediction website FiveThirtyEight, argue that fact-checkers too often focus on extreme cases or claims that cannot be proven one way or the other because of their liberal leanings .

“The Biden age check 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 matter for journalistic investigation, claims that the White House covered up Biden's shortcomings are often 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 the kind of counterspeech that is critical to democratic and open societies.

“It is true that on many issues there are conflicts of values, not just facts, and it is difficult for fact-checkers to give a firm verdict on which side is right. But in virtually any circumstance, good, rigorous, knowledge-based journalism can add context and provide additional relevant points around the issues being discussed,” he said.

“The ideal speech situation in a democratic society is one in which conflicting views collide and the truth prevails.”

While studies show 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 online.

A 2023 mega-study of about 33,000 participants in the US found that warning labels and digital literacy training 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 fact-checking initiatives have in many cases failed to change opinion in the same way that Trump's ban from major social media platforms has not. has made his followers disappear.

“I think in the new media economy, 'fact checking' an idea doesn't kill it anymore,” Kimball told Al Jazeera.

“Maybe in the legacy media it was easy to kill any alternative narratives, but now people can see the multitude of people who agree with them. You are no longer crazy for disagreeing with fact checking when you can 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?

Whigby said media history is littered with new forms of journalism that come and go in response to changing societal, cultural and political circumstances.

“Maybe the fact-checking movement will be reinvented 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 don't lose is the drive in journalism to pursue empirical realities as far as is humanly possible. This does not mean any kind of arrogance and feeling that journalism has all the answers. But I think that a pragmatic empirical approach—one that says we are open to changing our minds—and that looks for coherence in patterns of fact and accepts open debate is the right position for professional journalism.