Fact-checkers had no doubts about the actual audience for this week’s news, broadcast through Mark Zuckerberg’s chosen medium, the awkward video message – that, starting in the US, Meta would abandon professional third-party fact-checking on its networks in favor of the user-driven “community notes” model used in X.
“This is all aimed at currying favor with Trump,” a fact-checker wrote as soon as the news broke, on the private WhatsApp channel where the community gathered to vent. His public answers made Same point a little more diplomatically.
However, if the public were the incoming president of the United States, a crucial question arises on the other side of the Atlantic: how the European Union responds to the reduction of Meta. The answer could have consequences for fact-checkers far beyond Europe’s borders.
Meta’s fact-checking program today spans 130 countries and is the largest source of funding for fact-checking worldwide. It came together in a matter of weeks after the 2016 US elections, with some incitement from the fact-checkers themselves (as Zuckerberg faced) intense scrutiny about Facebook’s fake news problem. Not long ago Meta boasted about spending about $100 million on fact-checking efforts since 2016.
Still, fact-checkers have been worried for years that the social media giant would turn around again once the political winds changed. “I know most of us have relied on these resources, but deep down, we all knew this day would come,” Mehmet Atakan Foça, founder of Turkish fact-checking site Teyit, wrote on the WhatsApp channel. “I urge you to see this as a new beginning, an opportunity to rebuild from the ground up.”
Testing the new disinformation laws
Exactly what the new policy will mean for the world’s fact-checkers depends on how quickly and widely Meta rolls it out beyond the United States. The company has been deliberately vague on that issue, except to tell journalists had “no immediate plans” to end data verification in the EU, seen as a assent to its obligations under EU law.
The EU has led the world in building a sophisticated and comprehensive regulatory framework for global digital platforms such as Meta and Google, based on the Digital Services Act. A newly strengthened Code of Practice on Disinformation, developed with input from across civil society and designed to intertwine with the DSA, explicitly requires that the largest platforms work with researchers and fact checkers to mitigate the risks of online disinformation, including “fair financial contributions for the work of fact-checkers.”
But that regulatory framework is unfinished and untested. The EU case against Elon Musk’s X, the first formal positions submitted to the DSA, remains unresolved even as lawmakers call for a new investigation into the billionaire’s recent meddling in the European elections. Meanwhile, all major platforms appear to be falling very short of its commitments under the Self-Regulatory Code of Practice. It’s still an open question how platforms will have to work with fact-checkers, and what shape Enforcement will be necessary if those commitments are converted into a Code of Conduct as provided for in the DSA.
So far, the only one in the EU comment Meta’s main advantage has been that any major platform would have to “carry out a risk assessment and submit it to the EU Commission” before cutting ties with European fact-checkers. What the institution says and does next will be a crucial test of DSA principles and can help shape Meta policies around the world.
Carlos Hernández-Echevarría, head of policy at Spanish factchecker Maldita, argues that the DSA’s deliberately vague language, designed to be forward-looking and collaborative, is being exploited by “a US-based industry increasingly reluctant to do anything meaningful.” against disinformation and other online evils. However, the law is already in force and must be enforced.”
“At the end of the day, the European Commission will have to say publicly whether these platforms have ‘effective risk mitigation’ measures for disinformation. As broad as that concept is, I don’t think it’s something that can be said about many of them,” he added.
after newsletter promotion
Uncertain consequences
Still, the working assumption among fact-checkers is that Meta will eliminate third-party data verification in Europe and around the world, after testing the new community notes system in the United States. In his comments, Zuckerberg took aim at “a growing number of laws that industrialize censorship” in Europe and promised to “work with President Trump” to roll back restrictions around the world. Brazil has issued a legal demand for the company to clarify what Meta intends to do with its data verification operation there.
The consequences for the global fact-checking movement that has grown over the past two decades are difficult to predict, but they would be drastic. About 40% of fact-checkers enrolled in the International Fact-Checking Network principles, required to join the Meta program, are for-profit commercial operations. Many of them depend on Meta for all their income. If the program disappears entirely, perhaps a third of Meta’s 90 partners around the world would close or shut down their fact-checking arms.
Almost the rest, however, would be forced to lay off staff and drastically reduce their work. This includes dozens of nonprofit and university fact-checking efforts, from Brazil to Bosnia and Bangladesh, that use the money they make debunking hoaxes on Facebook and Instagram to help pay politicians who fact-check, as well as initiatives such as running media literacy programs, making policy work, and developing new technologies to fight misinformation.
“What has happened in the United States is just the beginning,” concluded the Philippine site Rappler, founded by Nobel laureate Maria Ressa. “It is an ominous sign of more dangerous times in the fight to preserve and protect our individual agency and our shared reality.”