Meta’s fact-checking partners say they were “surprised” by the company’s decision to abandon third-party data verification on Facebook, Instagram and Threads in favor of a Community Notes model, and some say they are now struggling to figure out if they can survive the hole this leaves in their funding.
“We heard the news like everyone else,” says Alan Duke, co-founder and editor-in-chief of fact-checking site Lead Stories, which began working with Meta in 2019. “Without warning.”
The news that Meta was no longer planning to use their services was announced in a blog post by global affairs director Joel Kaplan on Tuesday morning and an accompanying video from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Instead, the company plans to rely on X-style Community Notes, which allow users to flag content they consider inaccurate or requires further explanation.
Goal partners with dozens of fact-checking organizations and newsrooms around the world, 10 of which are based in the US, where the new Meta rules will be applied for the first time.
“This caught us by surprise,” Jesse Stiller, managing editor of Check Your Fact, Meta’s fact-checking partner, tells WIRED. Their organization started working with Meta in 2019 and they have 10 people working in the newsroom. “This was totally unexpected and out of character for us. “We didn’t know this decision was being considered until Mark posted the video overnight.”
News organizations that had partnered with Meta to address the spread of misinformation on the platform since 2016 are struggling to figure out how this change will affect them.
“We have no idea what the future of the website will look like,” Stiller says.
Duke says Lead Stories had a diverse revenue stream and the majority of its operations were outside the US, but says the decision would still have an impact on them. “The most painful part of this is losing some very good and experienced journalists, who will no longer be paid to investigate false claims found on Meta platforms,” Duke says.
For others, the financial implications are even more dire. An editor at a U.S.-based fact-checking organization that works with Metas, who was not authorized to speak on the record, told WIRED that Meta’s decision is “eventually going to wear us down.”
Meta did not respond to a request to comment on its partners’ allegations or the financial impact its decision would have on some organizations.
“Meta didn’t owe the fact-checkers anything, but it knows that by withdrawing this partnership it is eliminating a very important source of funding for the ecosystem globally,” says Alexios Mantzarlis, who helped establish the first partnerships between fact-checkers. data and Facebook between 2015 and 2019 as director of the International Fact-Checking Network.
Meta partners were also angered by Zuckerberg’s accusation that fact-checkers had become too biased.
According to Duke, it’s disappointing to hear Mark Zuckerberg accuse Meta’s third-party fact-checking program organizations in the United States of being “too politically biased.” “Let me check that. Lead Stories follows the highest standards of journalism and ethics required by the International Fact-Checking Network’s code of principles. “We fact-check regardless of where on the political spectrum a false claim originates.”