Lead Stories was surprised and disappointed to first learn through media reports and a press release about the end of the Meta Third-Party Fact-Checking Partnership of which Lead Stories has been a part since 2019.
On January 7, 2025, Joel Kaplan, the newly-appointed Chief Global Affairs Officer at Meta, announced in a press release that Meta will be ending the Third-Party Fact Checking Partnership in the U.S.
According to the announcement the facts-based journalism of the program will be replaced with a Community Notes system similar to the one on X.
What political bias?
The announcement was accompanied by a video of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg in which he stated, among other things:
After Trump first got elected in 2016 the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address these concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the U.S.
It is disappointing to hear Mark Zuckerberg accuse the organizations in Meta's U.S. third-party fact checking program of being "too politically biased", especially since one of the requirements Meta imposed for being part of partnership included being a verified signatory of the IFCN's Code of Principles, which explicitly requires a "commitment to non-partisanship and fairness".
In all the years we have been part of the partnership, we or the IFCN never received any complaints from Meta about any political bias, so we were quite surprised by this statement.
Censorship?
The press release talked about how the fact-checking partnership began:
We made what we thought was the best and most reasonable choice at the time, which was to hand that responsibility over to independent fact checking organizations. The intention of the program was to have these independent experts give people more information about the things they see online, particularly viral hoaxes, so they were able to judge for themselves what they saw and read.
This is something we, as fact-checkers, were (and still are) 100% behind. Fact-checking is about adding verified and sourced information so people can make up their mind about what to believe. It is an essential part of free speech.
However, the press release continued:
Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.
We would like to note that these labels and the consequences of labels (like reduced distribution or demonetization) were always 100% under the control of Meta and they could have changed or removed them at any time they chose. Over the years we have repeatedly advocated to Meta for changes to the size and wording of the labeling.
Meta also used the labels to inform their automated systems, sometimes leading to erroneous application of labels that fact-checkers were unfairly blamed for. We are happy to read Meta now acknowledges this:
Up until now, we have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn't have been.
Transparency & Community Notes
About the new Community Notes system, Meta's press release says: "We've seen this approach work on X" and:
- Just like they do on X, Community Notes will require agreement between people with a range of perspectives to help prevent biased ratings.
- We intend to be transparent about how different viewpoints inform the Notes displayed in our apps, and are working on the right way to share this information.
However, In our experience and that of others, Community Notes on X are often slow to appear, sometimes downright inaccurate and unlikely to appear on controversial posts because of an inability to reach agreement or consensus among users.
Ultimately, the truth doesn't care about consensus or agreement: the shape of the Earth stays the same even if social media users can't agree on it.
We would also like to note that X's Community Note system is entirely non-transparent about its contributors: readers are left guessing about their bias, funding, allegiance, sources or expertise and there is no way for appeals or corrections.
Fact-checkers, on the other hand, are required by the IFCN to be fully transparent about who they are, who funds them and what methodology and sources they use to come to their conclusions.
Our mission continues
Even though we are obviously disappointed by this news, Lead Stories wishes to thank the many people at Meta we have worked with over the past years and we will continue our fact checking mission. To paraphrase the slogan on our main page: "Just because it's now trending without a fact checking label still won't make it true."
