Civil society groups fighting falsehoods online have faced a barrage of political attacks ever since social media giant Meta announced it was moving away from fact-checking.
The community of fact-checkers — groups of journalists and researchers that work tirelessly to debunk disinformation on social media like Facebook, X, YouTube and TikTok — have become a prime target of populist firebrands and anonymous haters online.
POLITICO spoke to five people in fact-checking organizations that partnered with Meta in past years as part of its fact-checking program. Some of them described facing increasing online harassment, direct attacks from politicians and even death threats since Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he’d end a fact-checking program in the United States in an effort to combat censorship — a move widely seen as an attempt to please U.S. President Donald Trump.
“The first thing we’ve noticed after Zuckerberg’s statement … was a huge spread of harassment toward fact-checkers,” said Aistė Meidutė, editor of the fact-checking project Lie Detector at Lithuanian news outlet Delfi.
“It was a huge beat to our credibility. We see the after-effects right now,” she said, including death threats as part of the online blowback. “We are very worried,” she added, especially as Lithuania “is a particularly vulnerable region.”
Although Meta’s January announcement won’t immediately apply in the rest of the world, it will affect the work of dozens of civil society groups and media firms that have received funding from the U.S. giant over the past eight years to check and challenge claims on its social media platforms.
Other tech giants, including Google and LinkedIn, last week also dialed down their commitments to work with fact-checkers on a European Union disinformation code. X pulled out of the code altogether in 2023.
As Big Tech firms turn their backs on the efforts of EU authorities to regulate social media and stop disinformation, European democracies like Romania are being increasingly hit by foreign interference and manipulation campaigns online.
Fake-news fighters
Meta has been paying independent fact-checkers across the world since 2016, counting on them to help fight disinformation across social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Threads. They spot viral fake news and come up with accuracy ratings, which Meta shares widely and relies on to curb the visibility of falsehoods.
Zuckerberg now views those efforts as “intrusive labels and reduced distribution,” he said in a blog post. He plans to move to a looser system — an X-style community-notes system — which critics warn will be no match for newsroom corrections and may open the floodgates to unchecked disinformation.
Nick Clegg, Meta’s outgoing policy chief, described the new system as a “crowdsourced or Wikipedia-style approach to misinformation” that is “more scalable” than fact-checkers.
“I would urge you to look at the substance of what Meta announced. Ignore the noise and the politics and the drama around it,” Clegg told the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.
Haters are rejoicing
Anuška Delić, the editor-in-chief of Slovenia-based media Oštro, said “connecting censorship with fact-checking” has been damaging.
Fact-checkers “have been attacked from Day One of this partnership because people believe that we have access to their profiles, that we can delete content,” she said. Now the haters “are all rejoicing because they think they are getting rid of us.”
Her country’s former Prime Minister and opposition leader Janez Janša was one of them: “By[e], By[e] Anuška?” he wrote on X after Zuckerberg’s announcement.
Zuckerberg’s decision may have been an effort to court U.S. President Donald Trump, who has frequently railed against the media and Big Tech firms. According to the New York Times, the tech tycoon rolled out his new direction abruptly, blindsiding many of his staff.
“There was some sort of pivoting toward a new direction. But what was surprising is how fast it came about,” said Sophie Timmermann, the deputy head of German nonprofit Correctiv’s fact-checking program. “Meta has always been kind of a reliable partner.”
Morten Langfeldt Dahlback, the head of innovation at Norway’s Faktisk, seems to think the days are numbered for Meta’s fact-checking program in Europe.
“It’s hard for me to understand why they would keep the program here in its current form if they won’t have it in the U.S. where they are under the most direct political pressure anyway,” he said.
Regulatory roadblocks
Zuckerberg’s jibe at the EU’s “ever-increasing number of laws institutionalizing censorship” is another clue he will eventually extend the new policy to Europe, Langfeldt Dahlback said, even though there may be some regulatory “roadblocks.”
The biggest of those obstacles is the EU’s Digital Services Act, which requires the largest online platforms to be more transparent and accountable for systemic risks, including disinformation, that can run wild on their networks.
Meta has already fallen foul of the DSA, with the Commission having opened a probe into whether the company does enough to protect children online in addition to scrutiny of how it shows political content and its transparency with researchers. Violations run the risk of fines of up to 6 percent of annual global revenues.
The rules also require social media firms to check with the Commission before making big changes, which could delay any Meta move to mimic what it’s doing in the U.S.
“Prior to deploying functionalities that are likely to have a critical impact on systemic risks, very large online platforms are required to perform a risk assessment and submit a report to the Commission’s services,” Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said.
Press freedom organizations have urged the Commission to weigh in on Meta’s fact-checking decision and “forcefully resist the pressures exerted against European democracy.”
Delić said she hopes “that someone in the EU will have the guts to uphold the act,” worrying that the “slow bureaucracy machine that is the EU” may not be up to fighting “much faster … private individuals with a lot of money.”
European fact-checkers aren’t fearing for their jobs just yet, despite the potential loss of income and of “a form of distribution” to people that “tend not to be very regular consumers of traditional media,” Langfeldt Dahlback said.
“There’s an iteration of the fact-checking profession that’s maybe threatened,” he argued, which is about “limit[ing] the impact of viral misinformation on social media” and relies “heavily on having a least a working relationship with the platform companies.”
Keeping up the fight against misinformation is too important to abandon, Delić stressed, even without Meta’s money or the risk of “even more attacks, even more smears.”
“We will not not survive this,” she said.
This article has been updated to correct Sophie Timmermann’s title as the deputy head of the fact-checking program at Correctiv.
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