Meta will stop data verification in the United States: why is this change so criticized?

The surprising announcement of the technology giant Meta to end its data verification program in USA drew harsh criticism Tuesday from disinformation researchers, who warned of the risk of proliferation of false narratives.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was “getting rid” of its third-party fact-checkers in the United States, a radical change that analysts see as an attempt to appease US President-elect Donald Trump.

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“This is a big step back for content moderation at a time when misinformation and harmful content are evolving faster than ever,” said Ross Burley, co-founder of the nonprofit Center for Information Resilience. .

Fact-checking and investigating misinformation have been hot topics in a hyper-polarized political climate in the United States, with conservative advocates claiming it restricts free speech and censors right-wing content.

Trump’s Republican Party and his billionaire ally Elon Musk (owner of X, formerly Twitter) have expressed similar complaints.

“While efforts to protect free speech are vital, eliminating fact-checking without a credible alternative risks opening the floodgates to more harmful narratives,” Burley said.

“This measure seems more like a political appeasement strategy than intelligent policy.”

Alternatively, Zuckerberg said Meta platforms Facebook and Instagram could use “Community Notes, similar to what X does” in the United States.

Community Notes is a collaborative moderation tool in X for users to add context to posts, but researchers have repeatedly questioned its effectiveness in combating falsehoods.

“You wouldn’t trust just anyone to stop your toilet from leaking, but Meta is now looking to trust just anyone to stop misinformation from spreading on its platforms,” Michael Wagner, from the University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, told AFP. of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Asking people, pro bono, to police the false claims posted on Meta’s multi-million-dollar social media platforms is an abdication of social responsibility.”

“Political decision”

Meta’s new approach ignores research showing that “Community Notes users are highly motivated by partisan reasons and tend to target their political opponents too much,” said Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Safety, Trust and Security Initiative at Cornell Tech. .

Meta’s announcement represents a financial setback for its US-based third-party fact-checkers.

The Meta program and external grants have been “dominant sources of income” for global fact-checkers, according to a 2023 survey by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) of 137 organizations in dozens of countries.

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The decision will also “harm social media users who seek accurate and reliable information to make decisions about their daily lives and interactions,” said IFCN director Angie Holan.

“It is unfortunate that this decision was made following external political pressure from a new administration and its supporters,” Holan added.

Aaron Sharockman, executive director of the US fact-checking organization PolitiFact, disagrees that fact-checking serves to suppress free speech.

The role of American fact-checkers, he said, was to provide “additional discourse and context to posts that journalists considered contained misinformation” and it was Meta’s responsibility to decide what sanctions users faced.

“The good thing about free speech is that people can disagree with any news article we publish,” Sharockman said. “If Meta is upset about creating a censorship tool, she should look in the mirror.”

PolitiFact is one of the first partners to work with Facebook to launch fact-checking in the United States in 2016.

The AFP is also currently working in 26 languages ​​with Facebook’s fact-checking program, in which Facebook pays to use fact-checks from around 80 organizations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and Instagram.

In that program, content rated as “false” is demoted to decrease its visibility; if someone tries to share that post, they are presented with an article explaining why it is misleading.

“The program was by no means perfect, and the fact-checkers certainly got some percentage of their labels wrong,” Mantzarlis said. “But we must be clear that Zuckerberg’s promise to get rid of fact-checkers was a political decision, not a public policy decision.”