What “Facebook” & Social Media Shouldn’t Have to Do with Fact Checking and Facebook: Sen. Rand Paul, Alexios Mantzarlis, and Bill Adair

“Meta finally admits to censoring speech…what a great birthday present to wake up to and a huge win for free speech,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) posted on X on Monday.

“I think the fact-checking programs on social media have been really positive for helping to reduce hoax content and conspiracy theories. And to see it so quickly curtailed this way without a whole lot of discussion is disappointing,” Holan said.

According to Alexios Mantzarlis, who helped establish the first partnership between fact-checkers and Facebook, Meta didn’t owe anything, but it knows that pulling this partnership will leave a huge hole in the funding of the ecosystem globally.

Bill Adair said that it was “particularly troubling to see him echo claims of bias against the fact checkers” because he knows that the ones that took part in his program were signed up to be transparent and nonpartisan. He founded PolitiFact, one of the first participants in Facebook’s third party fact checker’s program, which he left in 2020.

Meta said that it would change how it enforces its policies, relying less on automated systems except for terrorism, child sexual exploitation, and fraud. The company’s U.S. content moderation team will move from California to Texas. It should help us build trust in places where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.

Out of Left Field: The Impact of Trump’s Decay on Meta and the Public Interests of False Narratives

“So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms,” he said.

Meta said it was abandoning third-party fact checkers and would instead rely on a community notes program which it said would allow users to write and rate notes next to posts. That’s similar to the approach Elon Musk has championed on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Facebook’s head of community said his views on moderation have changed. Meta has made “too many mistakes” in how it applied its content policies, he said, and pointed to Trump’s election to a second term as “a cultural tipping point towards once again prioritizing speech.”

Conservatives became more conservative after the 2020 election and the COVID epidemic. The attack on the Capitol in January of 2021 prompted social media companies to ban Trump from their platforms, but they later allowed him to return. In recent years fact checkers and researchers of false narratives have become targets of Congressional probes and legal challenges.

Meta will apply its rules to 10 of its fact-checking partnerships that are based in the US.

For others the financial implications are even more dire. The editor at a US-based fact-checking organization that works with Meta is telling WIRED that they are going to drain out, because of Meta’s decision.

Lead Stories has a variety of revenue streams and most of them are outside of the US, but Duke thinks the decision would have an impact on them. Losing good, experienced journalists who will no longer be paid to research false claims on Meta platforms is the most painful part of this.

“We were blindsided by this,” Jesse Stiller, the managing editor of Meta fact-checking partner Check Your Fact, tells WIRED. 10 people are working in the newsroom for his organization. “This was totally unexpected and out of left field for us. We weren’t aware this decision was being considered until Mark dropped the video overnight.”

The news that Meta was no longer planning on using their services was announced in a blog post by chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan on Tuesday morning and an accompanying video from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The company will rely on X-style Community Notes to flag content that they think is inaccurate or requires further explanation.