Face Checking Gets Boot At Facebook; Misinformation, Lies Get Early Gift
With the imminent return of a pathological liar and prince of disinformation to the White House, now is the worst time for social media to stop checking the veracity of what will continue to be an avalanche of outrageous claims.
And yet that is exactly what Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to do. Meta owns the two mammoth social media sites, Facebook and Instagram. Meta also will no longer collaborate with PolitiFact, a nonprofit owned by the Poynter Institute, and with Lead Stories, another non-profit fact checking organization.
Zuckerberg made the decision in an effort to appease trump’s efforts to fuel the spread of MAGA disinformation. Zuckerberg also donated $1 million through Meta to Trump’s inaugural fund and promoted longtime conservative Joel Kaplan to become Meta’s new global policy chief. Kaplan, a longtime GOP operative, strongly advocated in 2018 for the Supreme Court nomination of his close friend, Brett Kavanaugh. During trump’s first administration, Kaplan was considered for the post of director of the Office of Management and Budget. He was not appointed.
Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) CEO Dana White, who campaigned for trump, also was named to the board of Meta Platforms. White is President and CEO of UFC®, the world’s leading mixed martial arts organization,
Now is the worst time to end fact checking. Fact checking is exactly what is needed, especially with the advent of AI, to counter wild fake conspiracy theories spreading over everything from the cataclysmic fires in California to the persistent and stubborn lie that vaccines cause autism. The polarized nature of such right-wing media giants like Fox, a cesspool for misinformation, is all the more reason to continue objective fact-checking.
The extent of rumors about the wildfires has prompted the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to issue warnings and create a place where people can check out rumors at fema.gov/rumors.
“There has been a lot of rumors spreading about the #LosAngelesFire response. Rumors can create confusion and keep people from getting help they need. ONLY share information from trusted sources,” FEMA said.
Unchecked conspiracy theories cause serious harm, from residents being reluctant to ask for federal aid after a hurricane to interfering with first responders to lawmakers who act on rumors to enact laws restricting fair employment. And without fact checking, the credibility of social networks will be further undermined.
Viewers don’t have the skill and time to investigate claims so it will be easier for people like trump to blame the Democrats for the fires while his alter ego, Elon Musk, downplays the role of climate change and blames diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies for the fires.
And people won’t have the information to disprove claims like those made by disgraced conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that the fires were “part of a larger globalist plot to wage economic warfare and deindustrialize the United States before trigger total collapse.” Musk responded, “True,” to Jones’s claims and there was nobody to refute the comments on X because Musk owns the social network site with tens of millions of followers around the world.
Natural disasters are like catnip to conspiracy mongers. Just like they are doing now, the conspiracists said the government caused the devastating Maui wildfires in 2023 and Hurricanes Helene and Milton in 2024. Some, like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., have said the government is controlling the weather and that a Jewish laser started past California wildfires.
Ironically, Facebook’s fact-checking program was created to set up guardrails to refute the tsunami of lies during and after trump’s 2016 election. Zuckerberg said the fact-checking program will be replaced by a plan similar to the “Community Notes” feature on X, which is owned by trump’s top advisor, billionaire Elon Musk.
“Community Notes” is a crowd-sourced form of fact-checking where the platform can add notes to debunk or provide further context to posts. Community Notes only appear on posts when X users with “diverse perspectives” agree a post is warranted.
The community notes are unreliable because they are not written by legitimate journalists who are bound by ethical guidelines to provide fair and accurate assessments.
Zuckerberg said that the Biden administration had abused the fact-checking system by steering postings toward the left and away from MAGA. The billionaire said that community comments will halt the alleged interference by Democrats.
Zuckerberg also defended his decision with his claim that fact checking has become “a tool to censor,” and that “fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.”
Foreign Reactions
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said that Meta’s decision to scrap its fact-checking program in the U.S. was “extremely serious,” and that he would discuss the matter in a meeting with government officials.
“I’m going to have a meeting today to discuss the Meta issue,” the leftist leader told reporters in Brasilia. “I think it’s extremely serious that people want digital communication to not have the same responsibility as someone who commits a crime in the written press.”
A January 9 letter to Zuckerberg from The International Fact-Checking Network represented 118 fact checking organizations ranging from Congo Check in the Congo, Congo DR, Central African Republic; 15min in Lithuania, Demagog in Poland; FactCheckHub in Nigeria; Kashif in Palestine; StopFake in Ukraine and many others.
The letter said that Meta’s decision was a reaction to trump’s election certification and is “part of a broader response from the tech industry to the incoming administration. Mr. Trump himself said your announcement was ‘probably’ in response to threats he’s made against you.”
Meta’s plan to end fact-checking applies only to the United States, for now. But Meta has similar programs in more than 100 countries.
“Some of these countries are highly vulnerable to misinformation that spurs political instability, election interference, mob violence and even genocide. If Meta decides to stop the program worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places,” the letter said. “Most importantly, we believe the decision to end Meta’s third-party fact-checking program is a step backward for those who want to see an internet that prioritizes accurate and trustworthy information.”
The network letter disputed claims that fact checking must be halted because it has become politically biased.
“Meta required all fact-checking partners to meet strict nonpartisanship standards through verification by the International Fact-Checking Network. This meant no affiliations with political parties or candidates, no policy advocacy, and an unwavering commitment to objectivity and transparency,” the letter said.
The letter said that the community notes program on X has been unsuccessful because many notes never get displayed, because they depend on widespread political consensus rather than on standards and evidence for accuracy.
In addition to Facebook, fact-checking organizations include FactCheck.org, Snopes, PolitiFact and Lead Stories.
FactCheck.org
A recent issue refuted by FactCheck.org involved Republican claims that the Jan. 1 terrorist attack in New Orleans that killed 14 people and injured many more was tied to illegal immigration, when in fact the suspect was a U.S. citizen.
Fox News inaccurately reported a possible link to immigration. Even after Fox News retracted the story, trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., continued to suggest a link with illegal immigration. FactCheck verified that there was no indication that illegal immigration played a role in the attack and that the sole person accused of committing the crime was born in the U.S.
In December FactCheck disproved rumors that among pardons granted by President Joe Biden included a Chinese national who was imprisoned for child pornography. The check found that Jin was granted clemency as part of a prisoner swap last month that freed three Americans held for years in China and was not part of the pardons granted by Biden.
Also in December, FactCheck looked into claims linked with trump’s renewed call to end birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. whose parents are not in the country legally. The fact checking put the lie to online posts that falsely claimed four of trump’s children would lose their citizenship because of their mothers’ citizenship status when they were born.
FactCheck.org has partnered since December 2016 with Facebook. It is a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network at the Poynter Institute. The network promotes basic fact-checking standards through its code of principles.
FactCheck.org is a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that “aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics.” It is a project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania. It was established by publisher and philanthropist Walter Annenberg “to create a community of scholars within the University of Pennsylvania that would address public policy issues at the local, state and federal levels.”
The organization monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. The primary focus is on presidential candidates in presidential election years, and on the top Senate races in midterm elections. In off-election years, fact checking focuses on action in Congress.
An equal amount of time is devoted to reviewing claims by Republicans and Democrats by reviewing public statements. Sources include transcripts of Sunday talk shows, TV ads, C-SPAN, Presidential speeches and news conferences, campaign websites and press releases.
When statements are found to be inaccurate or misleading, fact check tries to contact the source who can provide evidence to support the facts. Subjects are dropped if supporting material shows a statement is accurate.
If the supporting material does not support the claim or if no evidence is provided, fact check conducts research through various avenues, including the Library of Congress for congressional testimony; the House Clerk and Senate Secretary’s office for roll call votes; the Bureau of Labor Statistics for employment data; the Securities and Exchange Commission for corporate records; the IRS for tax data; the Bureau of Economic Analysis for economic data; and the Energy Information Administration for energy data.
Other sources for fact checking include nonpartisan government agency reports from sources including the Congressional Budget Office, the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the federal inspectors general.
Outside experts also may be consulted and may include the Kaiser Family Foundation on health care data, the Tax Policy Center for tax data and the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Politifact
PolitiFact.com, operated by the Poynter Institute, began in 2007 as a project of the Tampa Bay Times (then the St. Petersburg Times).
Journalists select statements to evaluate and then publish their findings on the PolitiFact.com website, where each statement receives a “Truth-O-Meter” rating. The ratings range from “True” for statements the journalists deem as accurate to “Pants on Fire” (from the taunt “Liar, liar, pants on fire”) for claims the journalists deem as “not accurate and makes a ridiculous claim”.
In addition to political claims, the site monitors the progress elected officials make on their campaign promises, including a “Trump-O-Meter” for trump, an “Obameter” for President Barack Obama, and a “Biden Promise Tracker” for President Joe Biden.
PolitiFact won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for its reporting during the 2008 presidential election.
Lead Stories
Lead Stories was formed in 2016 by Maarten Schenk; Alan Duke, a retired CNN journalist; and Perry Sanders, a Colorado lawyer. Since February 2019, Lead Stories had been an active part of Facebook’s partnership with third party fact checkers. Under the terms of the partnership, Lead Stories got access to listings of content that has been flagged as potentially false by Meta’s systems or its users.
Since April 2020 Lead Stories also has provided fact checking related advice and services to ByteDance, the company running TikTok (in the United States, Europe and Asia).
Snopes
David and Barbara Mikkelson created an urban folklore web site in 1994 that would become Snopes.com. Snopes has been referenced by news media and other sites, including CNN, MSNBC, Fortune, Forbes, and The New York Times. By March 2009, the site had more than six million visitors per month.
In 2016, Snopes’s revenue came entirely from advertising.
In recent months, Snopes has investigated the validity of many claims, including accusations that Tesla, owned by Musk, “replaced” laid-off staff with H-2B Visa workers. The allegations were in contrast to trump’s plans to deport undocumented immigrants and possibly those in the U.S. with H-1B visas.
Tesla laid off around 6,600 workers in spring 2024. Around the same time the company filed about 1,300 H-1B visa applications. Snopes found there was “no evidence to confirm or deny the claim that Tesla filled the positions vacated by laid-off workers with new employees on H-1B visas.”
Fact checking by such sites as Snopes and Factcheck.org are mostly valuable for dispelling rumors but the sites also have confirmed facts which seemed outrageously far-fetched. For instance, Snopes found that:
· It is true that the largest reservoir in space holds 140 trillion times more water than earth’s oceans. The discovery was announced by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on July 22, 2011.
· A photo showed Vice President JD Vance wearing a “Soviet Communist T-Shirt.” Vance’s team confirmed that Vance wore a Halloween costume of WWE wrestler Nikolai Volkoff, with the “CCCP” partially visible underneath the hammer and sickle. CCCP is Cyrillic and stands for Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
· Snopes confirmed that trump once donated to Kamala Harris’ campaign. Campaign finance records showed trump donated $5,000 to Harris’ reelection campaign for California attorney general in 2011.
· Another Snopes review found that California was indeed named after a fictional island inhabited solely by Black women who kept griffins as pets and were led by a queen named Calafia.
· Snopes confirmed that cats are banned in the isolated town of Longyearbyen, Norway. Located on top of the “high Arctic wilderness, cats have been banned across the Svalbard archipelago.”
· A 1951 advertisement for Arrow Shirts authentically depicted Santa Claus contemplating shooting himself because he was overwhelmed with requests for Arrows Shirts. The ad showed Santa holding a gun, considering suicide with text that read, “Don’t do it, Santa… we’ve got good news.”