The leader of a charity dedicated to upholding impartiality in the media has slammed Meta’s decision to ditch its third-party fact-checking team in the United States.
Chris Morris, chief executive of Full Fact – a registered charity and non-profit founded in 2009 and based in London – said the move is “disappointing and a backwards step that risks a chilling effect around the world”.
Full Fact itself has participated in Meta’s fact-checking programme since January 2019. It checks images, videos and articles on its platforms and receives income depending on the amount of fact checking done.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of the group which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads, said the decision was motivated by “getting back to our roots around free expression”.
However the move is widely seen as a sop to incoming US President Donald Trump, whose Facebook and Instagram accounts were suspended for two years from 2021 after it accused him of praising those engaged in the riots at the Capitol which followed his defeat in the previous election.
Trump accused Meta of censorship and silencing conservative speech, going so far as to threaten to jail Zuckerberg if he interfered in the 2024 election. However Zuckerberg donated $1m to an inauguration fund following Trump’s victory as he seeks to ingratiate himself to Trump, with whom he dined recently at the latter’s Florida estate in Mar-a-Lago.
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The company will now rely on its users to report false stories and misleading information through a ‘Community Notes’ system similar to those on X. It will also actively promote political content such as people posting on inflammatory topics.
Zuckerberg said third-party fact checkers were “too politically biased” and too many users were being “censored”.
However Morris countered: “From safeguarding elections to protecting public health to dissipating potential unrest on the streets, fact checkers are first responders in the information environment. Our specialists are trained to work in a way that promotes credible evidence and prioritises tackling harmful information – we believe the public has a right to access our expertise.
“We absolutely refute Meta’s charge of bias – we are strictly impartial, fact-check claims from all political stripes with equal rigour, and hold those in power to account through our commitment to truth.
“Like Meta, fact-checkers are committed to promoting free speech based on good information without resorting to censorship. But locking fact-checkers out of the conversation won’t help society to turn the tide on rapidly rising misinformation.
“Misinformation doesn’t respect borders, so European fact-checkers will be closely examining this development to understand what it means for our shared information environment.”
Late last week former Deputy Prime Minister Sir Nick Clegg left Meta after seven years to be replaced as president of global affairs by his deputy Joel Kaplan.
Kaplan is a Republican who served as deputy chief of staff under former US President George W Bush. The move is widely seen as a way of cultivating a positive relationship with President-elect Trump’s incoming administration.
Sir Nick set up an independent body that reviews Facebook and Instagram content in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The co-chair of that oversight board told the BBC today that she is “very concerned” about how Meta’s decision to ditch fact-checkers will affect minority groups.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a former Prime Minister of Denmark, told the Today programme on BBC Radio Four that there were potentially “huge problems” around the impact on the LGBTQ+ community.
“We are seeing many instances where hate speech can lead to real-life harm, so we will be watching that space very carefully,” she said.