It was 2016, and the problem of fake news was not letting Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta (then called Facebook), breathe. The young businessman received all the media pressure and, in addition, continuous questions from the North American legal apparatus. The Cambridge Analytica case, accusations of Russian interference in the elections and then Donald Trump’s first landslide victory raised serious questions. Menlo Park, headquarters of Facebook’s offices, was shaking at its foundations. For the first time, the question of the platform’s influence on the political landscape was discussed. US lawmakers demanded the company “protect democracy.” It was a matter of time before Zuckerberg appeared before the Senate. He did it in 2018.
The owner of Facebook, with all the public relations tactics, defended himself. One of their arguments was that the company, after that reputation crisis, had created the Third Party Fact-checkersor Independent Fact Checkers, to address misinformation on their platforms.
The history of independent fact-checkers at Facebook
Implemented first in the United States and then in the rest of the world, the project seemed to work. Until now, according to its own data, there were 116 international organizations actively participating in it. In fact, last year, in the context of the European Union parliamentary elections, Meta communicated the effectiveness of its labeling system. “Between July and December 2023, for example, nearly 68 million posts on Facebook and Instagram had fact-checking labels. “When something is labeled false or misleading, 95% of people don’t click on the content.”
Everything changed drastically today, January 7, when Mark Zuckerberg announced the end of the program in the United States. It is only a matter of time before the initiative disappears in Latin America and the rest of the world, violating independent news organizations that depend, to a greater or lesser extent, on that funding. Those affected will be, for example, Political Animalin Mexico; Checkedin Argentina; Lupa Agencyeither Fate Yearsin Brazil, and damn.esin Spain. Why change something that was working, according to the company itself?
How does the Meta Independent Verifier Program work?
I was an editorial supervisor for El Sabueso, from Animal Político, when Meta approached us to start the project. To be part of it you had to join the certification of the Poynter Institutean international organization funded by the International Fact-checking Network (IFCN), which set the editorial rules for the verification of information with a highly rigorous and transparent code of principles. Meta relied on this network for the project, and also had its own demands. Among them: political speech or any type of content that classified as an opinion could not be denied. The statements of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), for example, could not be questioned, but the misinformation about the first migrant caravan, which crossed Mexico in the first year of AMLO’s six-year term (2018) and which strengthened a racist discourse, could. anti-immigrant.
The “news” that was denied were photos or videos out of context, such as the one that falsely said that a group of migrants had hijacked a truck in Chiapas. Also lies about alleged theft of children in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Then the COVID-19 pandemic arrived and independent fact-checkers took a leading role in disproving, with the available data, ideas such as “drinking bleach eliminates the virus” and that “5G networks had to do with pandemic”.
The verifying media argued why something was false and, later, the Facebook tool did not delete the original content, but rather added a label such as “False: verified by Animal Político”, or AFP, or one of the organizations on the network. . Meta ensured that once a post received the tag, its reach was drastically reduced. “We know that this program is working and that users find value in the tags after a verifier rates them,” reads an official Meta post. Zuckerberg’s company always said that it would not be an “arbiter of truth,” and that is why it did not delete the original publications, showing confidence in the IFCN organizations that did this work.
This 180-degree change responds to Donald Trump’s second victory at the polls and to competing methods, such as X’s Community Notes, which Elon Musk implemented after buying Twitter. Meta decided not to bet any more, or spend money, on his program. Now, it aspires for Facebook and Instagram users themselves to decide what content is disinformation or not.
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