The debate on fact-checking lights up after Meta’s latest decisions

“In the last few days, the announcement of Aim to abandon fact-checking for a system based on ‘Community Notes’ has caused discussion. It’s a move that many see as revolutionary, but which actually hides an implicit admission: fact-checking doesn’t work. And it hasn’t worked for years.” So Walter Quattrociocchi, director of the Center for Data Science and Complexity for Society (CDCS) at Sapienza, commented on the news that Meta will change its content review policies on Facebook and Instagram, eliminating third-party fact checkers and replacing them with “community notes” generated by users.

In 2016, the company launched an independent fact-checking program, in the wake of claims that it had failed to prevent foreign actors from exploiting its platforms to spread misinformation and sow discord among Americans. In the years since, it has continued to struggle with the spread of controversial content on its platform, such as election misinformation, anti-vaccination stories, violence and hate speech. The company has built security teams, introduced automated programs to filter or reduce the visibility of false claims, and established a kind of independent Supreme Court for tough moderation decisions, known as the Oversight Board.

Ma ora Zuckerberg sta following in the footsteps of fellow social media leader Musk which, after acquiring false statements. “Already in our work Debunking in a World of Tribes – continues Quattrociocchi – we had shown that fact-checking, far from being a solution, often makes things worse, strengthening polarization and consolidating echo chambers. Yet, despite this evidence, millions of dollars have been spent on solutions that anyone with a modicum of intellectual honesty would have recognized as failures. Duncan Watts, in a recent article published in Nature, underlined how the discourse of intellectuals and journalists on disinformation is often disconnected from reality. We talk about fake news as if they were the main problem, completely ignoring that it is the business model of the platforms that creates the conditions under which disinformation thrives. Truth, in its broadest sense, is often ambiguous, contextual, and subject to interpretation. Fact-checking, as it was conceived, cannot help but fail to solve the problem of misinformation, since it limits itself to contrasting ‘labels’ with the emotional virality of the contents. Social platforms are not designed to be information tools, but entertainment machines. They reward what captures attention, what excites, what divides, because this is what generates engagement. It is not a system built to guarantee the quality of information, but to maximize the time people spend online. For years, some have tried, ignoring scientific evidence, to keep the information world as it was before the advent of social media. The point, however, is that it has never been possible to stem this transformation. Imposing a control model from above has never worked. We have known something about it since the times of the Holy Office, which with its book burnings certainly did not prevent science from progressing.”

“The only possible antidote – concludes Quattrociocchi – and we have seen it clearly, is to make users aware of how we interact on social media. There is no other way. A collective reflection on our online behavior is the key to tackling the problem at its root. How has information been provided on these issues in recent years? Why was scientific evidence ignored? How much money has been thrown into initiatives that were known from the beginning to be meaningless? And, above all, who pays for these mistakes? We talk a lot about data-driven policy, but then we ignore strong and consolidated evidence for some reason. It would be interesting to understand what this reason is.”