Fact checking is part of it. Can it survive the pushback from conservatives and Big Tech?

In a coffee-table letter published last year about his first term in office, US president-elect Donald Trump threatened to arrest Mark Zuckerberg, suggesting that the Meta CEO had helped rig the 2020 election.

Conspiracy theories have been rampant on social media, including On the social networks of Meta, Facebook and Instagram. It was finally released by one of third-party groups that Meta has paid to evaluate popular content on its sites.

On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced the abrupt end of the Meta fact-checking program in the US, which earned praise from Trump.

Zuckerberg's move appeared to be aimed, in part, at protecting Meta from a growing effort by Republican lawmakers and activists to cripple the emerging fact-checking industry and social media.

It also causes a reckoning among fact-checkers themselves about the value and effectiveness of their work amid the daily tide of lies.

“Fact checking is under attack. It has been given a bad name by some corners of our politics in the US and around the world,” said Katie Sanders, editor-in-chief of PolitiFact, until this week. of partners in the Meta fact-checking program.

“We're still in the early stages of resolving the issues. But there's anxiety in the air, for sure.”

'Let's just label it'

Fact-checking has become the norm in the media since at least the 1930s.

But as social media grew in popularity in the 2000s, a number of publications emerged — such as FactCheck.org and PolitiFact — devoted almost entirely to verifying the public's statistical statements.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016, however, proved to be a watershed moment for this emerging industry.

The candidate's penchant for lying, along with concerns about social media being used by foreign actors to manipulate public opinion, has put a lot of pressure on companies like Facebook to take action.

Facebook has entered into partnership agreements with several fact-checking outlets to review content flagged as potentially misleading. The program eventually expanded to about 130 other countries, including Canada.

“People really thought, let's just label it. We should just tell people what's false, what's not, and that will solve the problem,” said Katie Harbath, former director of public policy at Facebook.

“But soon there were challenges with the fact-checking system. They can't do it quickly and they can't do it at scale.”

Those errors were often a source of frustration for liberals, who felt that too much misinformation was slipping through the cracks. On the other hand, many conservatives believe that its content has been unfairly targeted for validation.

Republican-led retreat

In recent years, suspicion of fact-checking programs has turned into open hostility.

Congressional Republicans and conservative activists focused on The Election Integrity Partnership, a fact-checking coalition of academics and other experts, many legal demands that it stopped working last June.

Trump's pick to head the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has spent weeks attacking the fact-checking efforts of big tech companies. He accused them of supporting the “research movement” and threatened regulatory action.

Carr singled out NewsGuard, a company that measures the credibility of news sites and has given low scores to pro-Trump outlets that are spreading false claims about the 2020 election, such as NewsMax. (Other conservative outlets, including Fox News and the New York Post, are rated as reliable.)

“Everybody is hurt by misinformation … whether misinformation hurts the left or hurts the right, because it means that people are operating with a less comprehensive understanding of basic facts than they should have,” said NewsGuard CEO Gordon Crovitz, Republican Life all and former publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

“I think this is a very partisan issue. It's taken from something that's partisan at the moment in the States, but I think that's passing. Trusted information is important to all parties in a democracy.”

Zuckerberg is under scrutiny

Meta's decision to kill the fact-checking program was part of a broader set of changes aimed at loosening content restrictions on the term “free speech.”

These include new policies which allows users to call LGBTQ people mentally ill or queer.

In a five-minute video announcing the changes, Zuckerberg said Meta's fact-checkers are “very politically biased.”

Ending the program, he added, “will greatly reduce the amount of research on our bases.”

His reasoning, not surprisingly, was scrutinized by fact-checkers.

They stated that their partners in the program have never removed content from Meta sites. Their work only appeared as a warning attached to well-reviewed content.

“We have a robust process in place to investigate claims that we are willing to investigate. We have an ongoing process of how we are going to learn about this topic and get an accurate response,” Sanders said. “It takes time — and expertise, frankly.”

Ultimately it was Meta's decision to remove the content or shut down the page, something the company rarely did, according to Sanders.

Much of what fact-checkers flagged on a daily basis was not political speech, but rather scams and other forms of clickbait, said Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, a think tank in New York. York.

“That was the kind of thing this program was meant to solve. It wasn't meant to solve political lies, as old as humanity,” said Mantzarlis, former director of the International Fact-Checking Network, which helped Facebook. set up its own reality check system.

Meta's PolitiFact work included curating information about mass shootings, natural disasters and ineffective or dangerous health remedies.

“I would expect it to be an inappropriate place for those claims to go unchallenged,” Sanders said.

Zuckerberg said the fact-checking system will be replaced by a process similar to Community Notes, the crowd-sourcing method used in X.

While crowd-sourced fact-checking can work for the right reasons, the Public Notes feature on X is primarily a platform for further debate, Mantzarlis said.

“The irony of Zuckerberg throwing facts under the bus as a 'party' is that the alternative he's proposing doesn't seem like a place for bipartisanship and Kumbaya fusion,” he said.

With high supply comes high demand

Currently, Meta is only completing its fact-checking program in the US A division of Agence France-Presse provides fact-checking in Canada and continues to operate.

“It's very difficult for the fact-checking community and journalists. We are assessing the situation,” AFP said in a statement after Zuckerberg's announcement.

Meta has been a major sponsor of fact-checking operations in the US, and its withdrawal could cause a realignment in the industry, Sanders said.

“But it is not something that can be killed, it will remain regardless of whether the people in power like it or not,” he said.

In fact, given the endless supply of misinformation, the need for fact-checking has never been higher for marketers, Crovitz said.

“There's a lot of disinformation, whether it's coming from Russia, China, Iran or artificial intelligence generating models,” he said.

“And there's a growing number of organizations that are concerned about misinformation and want to make sure they're not contributing to it.”