PURVEYORS of false information must be gloating, following the decision of Meta last week to end its fact-checking operations in the US.In a major policy shift last week, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company would be cutting ties with the third-party fact-checking organizations it has been working with for the past decade, saying they had become 'biased' in selecting content to moderate and were impeding free speech.'It's time to get back to our roots around free expression,' Zuckerberg said.From now on, Meta's online platforms Facebook, Instagram and Threads will switch to community notes, a system similar to those used by X, in screening content.Fact-checking has been an integral tool in verifying the accuracy and credibility of information that flows through social media. Without it, netizens are easy prey for mock and manipulated news churned out by troll farms, insidious bloggers and government propagandists.Fact-checkers flag misinformation but do not have the authority to delete content or remove offensive pages. It is up to the organization the fact-checkers are working for to take action.Since 2016, Meta has partnered with media organizations like Agence France-Presse and Rappler in assessing false information. It also maintains its own team of content moderators.Zuckerberg had been a big fan of fact-checking. 'We take misinformation seriously,' he declared after Facebook launched its fact-checking program.Meta's crackdown on fake news was far from being appreciated by Donald Trump. When he was president, Trump had a running feud with Meta throughout his term.He was particularly incensed when Meta shut down his Facebook account after the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol.In his book 'Save America,' Trump threatened Zuckerberg with imprisonment: 'He told me there was nobody like Trump on Facebook. But at the same time, and for whatever reason, steered it against me. We are watching him closely, and if he does anything illegal this time, he will spend the rest of his life in prison — as will others who cheat in the 2024 presidential election.'Zuckerberg abruptly changed his tune after Trump campaigned for a second term last year and even reportedly donated $1 million to the incoming president's inaugural committee.Zuckerberg also hailed Trump's defeat of Vice President Kamala Harris last November as a 'cultural tipping point to once again prioritizing speech.'Worse, he threw the fact-checkers under the bus, saying they 'have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created.'Meta's new policy has triggered a wave of condemnation across the world. Filipino Nobel laureate Maria Ressa warned of 'extremely dangerous times ahead.' Meta's actions would lead to a 'world without facts,' and 'that's a world that's right for a dictator,' she said.Neil Brown, president of the Poynter Institute, pushed back at accusations that fact-checking is a form of censorship: 'Facts are not censorship. Fact-checkers never censored anything. And Meta always held the cards.''It's time to quit invoking inflammatory and false language in describing the role of journalists and fact-checking,' Brown said.Agence France-Presse, which operates AFP Fact Check, one of the organizations that collaborated with Meta, said Meta's decision was 'a hard hit for the fact-checking community and journalism.'Some socmed analysts see Zuckerberg as trying to ensure the survival of Meta as a company under a second Trump administration. They also expect more pro-Trump content on Facebook and Instagram soon.Other experts are worried that Meta is following the disturbing trend among social media platforms to shift toward 'a conservative-friendly, laissez-faire approach to speech.'One expert notes 'a shift rightward in terms of attitudes toward free speech in Silicon Valley, and perhaps this (Meta) decision is part of that.'That shift means socmed platforms could be less inflexible in their interpretation of what is fake news, and accordingly modulate the need to check content.That's not welcome news for fact-checkers who are already waging an uphill battle against spreaders of misinformation and conspiracies. Their job has become even harder. And that makes social media users even more vulnerable to information misuse and manipulation.
