Meta fact-checking fails to label 86% of posts with false narratives

Only 14 percent of the examples of disinformation narratives that the anti-false information organization NewsGuard has analyzed on social media in Meta have been identified as fake under the data verification.

Meta has announced a change in the moderation system in the United States, because it has decided to rely on community notes and withdraw the independent information verifier program, in which more than 80 organizations participate in more than 60 languages.

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The verification program, however, is not infallible, as can be seen from an investigation carried out by the organization specialized in combating false information NewsGuard, which has analyzed a sample of 30 Russian, Chinese and Iranian disinformation narratives in the period between June 2023 and January 2025.

The 30 false narratives have been identified in 457 posts on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, with claims such as that actor Johnny Depp and Russian model Yulia Vlasova will open a jewelry store in Moscow, that Germany plans to welcome 1.9 million Kenyan workers and that the singer Taylor Swift had attacked Taiwan with a message written on a banner.

Of the total publications analyzed, the research identified that 14 percent (66) had a verification label, while the other 86 percent (391) lacked one, as set out in the research text.

This low percentage occurs with the data verification system still in force. According to Meta, when an expert contributor detects a post with a false claim, the automatic system searches for other posts with the same narrative to apply verification labels to them as well.

For NewsGuard analysts, “if Meta applies the same technology and rules to apply community notes to posts that it has used for tags generated by fact-checkers, the results are likely to be no more promising.”

They also warn that “the results could be even weaker in terms of speed and coverage because a community note requires a process in which it must first be demonstrated that a community of users has what Facebook has said it has to be.” a range of perspectives.