X is not a Disaster for Meta, but a Warning Against Its Implications For Fact-Checking Organizations and Newsrooms

It seems that it will be an unmitigated disaster, according to Alex Mahavedan, digital media literacy project director for the Poynter Institute. (The Poynter Institute also operates PolitiFact, which is a Meta fact-checking partner.) By putting so much emphasis on something so nebulous as “free speech” as the ultimate goal—never mind that fact-checking is itself a form of speech—Meta risks a permissiveness that allows misinformation to flourish, Mahavedan says. He’s not alone.

“Meta didn’t owe fact-checkers anything, but it knows that by pulling this partnership it’s removing a very significant source of funding for the ecosystem globally,” says Alexios Mantzarlis, who helped establish the first partnerships between fact-checkers and Facebook between 2015 and 2019 as director of the International Fact Checking Network.

The financial consequences are much more dire for others. One editor at a fact-checking organization in the US that works with Meta told WIRED that the decision will eventually drain them out.

Duke says Lead Stories has a diverse revenue stream and most of its operations are outside of the US, but he claims the decision would still have an impact on them. Duke says that a lot of good experienced journalists will no longer bepaid to research false claims found on Meta platforms.

The managing editor of Meta fact-checking partner Check Your Fact says that they were surprised by the news. He has an organization that works with Meta that has 10 people in the newsroom. “This was totally unexpected and out of left field for us. We were not aware of the decision being made until Mark dropped the video.

Meta is working with many fact-check organizations and newsrooms across the globe and 10 of them are based in the US.

The announcement that Meta was changing their use of their services was made in a video and a post by the chief global affairs officer. Instead, the company plans to rely on X-style Community Notes, which allow users to flag content that they think is inaccurate or requires further explanation.

X seems like it should be a cautionary tale rather than a North Star for Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Users and advertisers alike fled in droves since Musk took. Timelines are increasingly filled with far-right debate-me edgelord accounts that post a constant churn of misinformation. The person is just the owner. Yet Meta has made clear that this is the future it wants.

The appeal to “free expression” mirrors Musk’s, although in Meta’s case it seems less about commitment to abstract ideals than it is a concerted effort to make nice with MAGA; Meta has spent years unsuccessfully trying to counter claims of bias from conservatives and now has chosen to abandon the fight entirely. You can’t work the referees if there aren’t any to begin with.

“As well-intentioned as many of these efforts have been, they have expanded over time to the point where we are making too many mistakes, frustrating our users and too often getting in the way of the free expression we set out to enable,” Kaplan wrote of the fact-checking program and other moderation tools. “We want to fix that and return to that fundamental commitment to free expression.”