A prominent group of fact-checkers called an emergency meeting after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that the social media platforms controlled by the company would move toward prioritizing free speech.
Members of the International Fact-Checking Network, a group of more than 170 organizations across the planet, previously had a major role in fact-checking content on Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.
The emergency meeting came in direct response to the new announcement, IFCN Director Angie Holan said in an interview with Business Insider.
“We hold these meetings monthly, but we called this one specifically because of today’s news,” she confirmed.
Holan revealed that the IFCN member organizations are annoyed at the change announced by Zuckerberg.
“This program has been a major part of the global fact-checking community’s work for years,” she complained.
“People are upset because they saw themselves as partners in good standing with Meta, doing important work to make the platform more accurate and reliable.”
Zuckerberg apparently did not see the fact-checkers in quite the same way.
In his Tuesday statement, the executive called fact-checkers too “politically biased” and said that they “destroyed more trust than they created.”
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Instead of relying on fact-checkers, Meta will implement a “community notes” system similar to those implemented on social media platform X after Elon Musk bought the company formerly known as Twitter.
Rather than zealously policing user content, Zuckerberg said that Meta would emphasize “illegal and high-severity violations.”
Holan admitted in the interview with Business Insider that the activity of the fact-checkers indeed limited the reach of certain posts that they deemed to be misinformation.
“It was never about censorship but about adding context to prevent false claims from going viral,” she said.
In perhaps the most revealing comment in the interview, Holan added that “this is bad news for the financial sustainability of fact-checking journalism.”
These fact-checkers had a solid arrangement for quite a while.
They received handsome payments from a massive Silicon Valley technology conglomerate to comb through content and censor anything inconsistent with their ideology.
But now the racket has come to an end.
Time will tell whether Zuckerberg has an actual commitment to free speech. He could have experienced a political awakening, he could be responding to market pressures produced by the less-censored X, or perhaps he is trying not to be on the bad side of President-elect Donald Trump.
In any case, the fact-checkers are on his bad side, and that is welcome news.
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