The founder of Facebook Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday that his company, Meta, would eliminate the factinspectors in the United States, accusing them of making biased decisions and saying he wanted to allow greater freedom of expression. Meta uses independent third-party fact-checkers around the world. Here, one of them, who works for the Full Fact organization in London, explains what they do and reacts to Zuckerberg’s “disheartening” accusation.
I have been a fact checker at Full Fact in London for a year, investigating suspicious content on Facebook, X and in newspapers. Our daily bread includes a large number of disinformation videos about the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine and fake AI-generated video clips of politicians, which are increasingly difficult to refute. Colleagues are working on Covid misinformation, hoaxes about cancer cures, and there’s plenty of climate stuff going on as we see more hurricanes and wildfires.
As soon as we log in at 9am, we are assigned something to watch. Our access to Meta systems shows us which posts are most likely to be fake. Sometimes there are 10 or 15 different things that seem harmful and it can be overwhelming. But we can’t check everything.
If a post is slightly crazy but not harmful, like the AI-generated image of the Pope in a giant white puffer coat, we might leave it. But if it’s a fake image of Mike Tyson holding a Palestinian flag, we’re more likely to address it. We present them at our morning meeting and then we are tasked with starting verification.
Yesterday I was working on a deepfake video of Keir Starmer saying that many of the claims about Jimmy Savile were frivolous and that’s why he didn’t press charges at the time. It is generating a lot of participation. Starmer’s mouth didn’t look right and it didn’t look like something he was going to say. It seemed like misinformation. I went straight into the reverse image search and discovered that the video was taken from The Guardian in 2012. The original was of much higher quality. You can see exactly what he’s saying compared to what’s being shared on social media, which is very blurry around the mouth. We’ve reached out to The Guardian to the original, Downing Street, for comment and may be in contact with several media forensics and deepfake AI experts.
Some misinformation continues to resurface. There is a particular video of a gas station explosion in Yemen last year that is repurposed to show a bombing in Gaza or a Hezbollah attack on Israel.
The fact checker collects examples of where it appeared on social media in the last 24 hours or so, often how many likes or shares it was shared, and sets out how we know it’s wrong.
There are two levels of review before we can attach a fact check to a Facebook post. Senior colleagues question every leap of logic we’ve taken. If something is a repeated claim, this process could be done in half a day. New, more complex cases could take almost a week. The average is approximately one day. Sometimes the back and forth can be frustrating, but we need to be as 100% safe as possible.
It was pretty hard to hear Mark Zuckerberg say on Tuesday that fact-checkers were biased. Much of the work we do is being impartial and that is instilled in us. It feels like a very important job where I make a difference and provide good information to people.
It’s what I wanted to do in my previous job in local journalism, go down the rabbit hole, track down sources, but there weren’t many opportunities. There was a lot of churnalism. As a local reporter, I was concerned about how many conspiracy theories people actually engage with and believe in Facebook groups and I felt helpless.
At the end of the work day it can be difficult to disconnect. I’m still thinking about how I can prove something as quickly as possible. Watching shares and likes on content increase all the time is a little worrying. But when the fact check is released, it’s a satisfying feeling.
Zuckerberg’s decision was disheartening. We worked hard on this and we believe this really matters. However, there is a renewed sense that we are determined to fight the good fight. Misinformation is not going to disappear. We will continue here, working against that.