Fact-checkers, targeted by MAGA loyalists, blast Zuckerberg’s assertion their work was ‘biased’

CNN

By Brian Stelter and Liam Reilly, CNN

New York (CNN) — Meta’s surprise decision to scrap its fact-checking partnerships – blindsiding journalists involved in the program and putting some out of work – is part of a much bigger shift in media and politics.

The very notion of fact-checking is under assault by a wide array of fact-challenged politicians and interest groups. Particularly on the right, “fact-check” has been turned into a dirty word, one that presupposes the fact-checker is actually suppressing some inconvenient truth.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg played right into that assumption on Tuesday when he insulted fact-checkers as “too politically biased” and said they “have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”

Destroyed trust among whom, exactly? Zuckerberg didn’t say. But President-elect Donald Trump, who keeps fact-checkers busy and hates being corrected by them, welcomed Meta’s changes. So did the wide world of pro-Trump media. “Trump gets results,” Fox’s Laura Ingraham said Tuesday night, touting Meta’s “major shakeup.”

As CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan found through his interviews with Trump rallygoers, MAGA loyalists bristled at the existence of fact-checks on Facebook and objected to content moderation that they described as censorship. They trusted Trump over any attempt to fact-check him.

But for a wider audience, Meta’s support for outside fact-checking outlets helped make the internet a little bit less polluted by lies and propaganda.

Now, some of those outlets may be forced to shut down once Meta’s financial support dries up.

“This is a blow to our website and the work that we do,” Jesse Stiller, managing editor of Check Your Fact, told CNN. “We are going to be impacted greatly and our operations will be grounded to a halt. This is not good for discourse and dialogue.”

Alan Duke, a former CNN journalist who now runs the fact-checking site Lead Stories, said his firm was blindsided by Meta’s announcement and by Zuckerberg’s accusation about bias.

“Meta never questioned Lead Stories about political bias in our six years in the program,” Duke said. “In fact, we would have lost our contract if they suspected it.”

Duke said his website will stay in business – it has other sources of funding, including TikTok’s parent company ByteDance – but Meta’s decision affects some of its work in the United States, and “sadly, this will mean some very good journalists will be looking for work elsewhere.”

“Without fact checking on Meta, disinfo spreaders will be partying like it’s 2016,” Duke added.

That’s the year when made-up stories on social media propelled Facebook and other tech companies to take action. Now, Zuckerberg is essentially reversing those flawed but well-intentioned efforts.

The flaws were real – and caused some journalists and activists to assail the entire initiative. Once a post was labeled false or missing context, the content was algorithmically downranked on the platform to avoid spreading misinformation.

Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said the decision “will hurt social media users who are looking for accurate, reliable information to make decisions about their everyday lives and interactions with friends and family.”

Holan, the former editor of PolitiFact, challenged Zuckerberg’s claim about bias, saying “that attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”

At the risk of referencing 2016 again, it’s a “war on truth.”

A 2016 essay with that title, by veteran reporter and author Dan Gillmor, said “U.S. journalists have an obligation to call out presidential candidates when they lie.”

Then as now, Trump’s firehose of falsehood was the issue. But Meta’s rollback of its fact-checking ambitions has ramifications far beyond US politics.

Science Feedback, another one of Meta’s fact-checking partners, said “the public faces an ever-growing risk of being misled by powerful actors prioritizing their own interests over the well-being of their audience or the public good.”

Meta said it will adopt a “community notes” system for fact-checking, modeled on X’s program, which encourages unpaid users with different points of view to agree on corrective notes for misleading content.

“While a crowd-sourced model for content verification may work in theory, it cannot magically succeed without relying on expertise, particularly on complex scientific and technical topics like those addressed by Science Feedback,” the group said.

Science Feedback recently published an analysis finding that X’s community notes system failed to address “most of the misinformation identified by fact-checkers on the platform” around last year’s European Parliament elections.

Duke noted community users were also not bound by ethical guidelines to provide fair and accurate fact checks.

“The idea of replacing professional journalists who are bound by the IFCN’s code of ethics with a hodge podge group of ‘community’ volunteers is dangerous,” he said. “A community note participant does not have to follow any rules, does not disclose who is paying them, and is not tested for bias.”

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