Headline Roundup • January 8th, 2025
The End of Fact Checking at Meta: An Overdue Change or Pro-Trump Pivot?
Facts And Fact Checking,Technology,Social Media,Censorship,Online Censorship,Free Speech,Meta,Mark Zuckerberg
Summary from the AllSides News Team
After Mark Zuckerberg announced an end to Meta's third-party fact checking program, some on the left sided with the fact-checkers. On the right, some saw the pivot as vindication.
From the Left: Voices on the left were less likely to see the alleged political bias of fact-checkers as a problem. In the New York Times (Lean Left bias), fact checking organizations said they had no say over what Meta did with the fact checked content. A piece in The Verge (Lean Left bias) also quoted fact-checking organizations and researchers concerned that users will now have to wade through virtually unmoderated hate speech and disinformation. Others framed the change as a "Trump-friendly" shift to the right.
From the Right: A writer in The Western Journal (Right bias) reacted to the New York Times piece saying, “In other words, it’s fake news that fact-checkers were actively policing fake news, which is the real problem. In fact, the Times seemed to imply by the very premise of the article, the problem was too little power was given to the fact-checkers, not too much.” Christopher Bedford in The Blaze (Right bias) cheered the change, but Margi Conklin, who was the Sunday editor of the New York Post (Lean Right bias) when a story it ran on the lab leak was flagged by Meta's fact checkers as false, said it was too little too late.
A Third Way: AllSides believes in a different approach to fact-checking. Read more here.
Featured Coverage of this Story
Mike Kai Chen for The New York Times
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, blamed the company’s fact-checking partners for some of Facebook’s moderation issues, saying in a video that “fact-checkers have been too politically biased” and have “destroyed more trust than they created.”
Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta have taken issue with that characterization, saying they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.
“I don’t believe we were doing anything, in any form, with bias,” said Neil Brown, the president of the Poynter Institute, a global nonprofit that runs PolitiFact, one of Meta’s...
AllSides
With the announcement Meta will end its fact checking program, people are wondering: What’s the best way for the digital media space to handle untruths, today and beyond?
Americans lost trust with fact checking when it became akin to a dictatorship — one small group of elites telling everybody what to think. We don’t trust dictatorships, even ones we consider benevolent, as history shows they always go wrong. But we also don’t want pure anarchy, where lawlessness and the powerful overwhelm society, and everyone else suffers.
(Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)
Mark Zuckerberg thinks that the move toward so-called “fact-checking” articles on Meta’s platforms — notably Facebook and Instagram — has just added to distrust and bias. That’s why he’s taking it off and replacing it with a system similar to that employed by Elon Musk’s X, on based around community notes.
The New York Times knows who’s to blame for this: Meta and Zuckerberg, because the fact-checkers say that that’s all fake news.
And people wonder why the system is on its way out.
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