Q&A: Lucas comes across Meta's decision to close her global fact of verification of the facts

Register The media todayCJR daily newsletter.

In a January 7 live January loaded with right dog whistles, the meta-PDG Mark Zuckerberg announcement that the social media giant would end his program to verify third -party facts.

“We are going to get rid of the facts of the facts and replace them with community notes similar to X starting in the United States,” said Zuckerberg via Instagram Live. “After Trump was elected for the first time, in 2016, the inherited media has constantly wrote about how disinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to respond to these concerns without becoming the referees of the truth, but the factors of facts were just too politically biased and destroyed more confidence than they created. »»

Originally implemented in 2016, the Meta fact verification program was one of the most important in the world, having given more than $ 100 million For approximately 90 independent editorial rooms and organizations of verification of the facts recorded with the International Coching Network of the facts (IFCN), a coalition based in Poynter which Meta also finance.

“In all years, we were part of the partnership, we or IFCN have never received Meta complaints about political prejudices, so we were quite surprised by this declaration”, ” Maarten Schenk,, Co -founder and COO / CTO of Head storieswrote in a Opinion response at the announcement.

The decision fell three weeks before the second inauguration of Donald Trump, who historically threw Meta as “people of the peopleFor his efforts to alleviate disinformation on her platforms and has many times prison threatened Zuckerberg specifically, if the platform continues to “censor” it or its supporters by checking the facts or deleting their messages. Meta notably gave $ 1 million to the Trump inauguration fund in December.

In a open letter In IFCN Zuckerberg, member organizations expressed their confusion and disappointment in the company’s decision:

“From what we could say, the program was effective. Research indicated that the fact verification labels have reduced the belief and sharing of false information.… We believe that the decision to end the Meta fact verification program is a step back for those who want to see a Internet which favors precise and trustworthy information. »»

In an effort to give meaning to this financial blow to the fact verification community, the research assistant of the Row Kaylee Williams discussed with Dr Lucas Gravesprofessor of journalism at the University of Wisconsin – Madison and author of Decide what is true: the rise in verification of political facts in American journalism. The conversation has been modified for duration and clarity.

KW: Can you help us understand the meaning of Meta’s decision and what it means for journalists and the journalism / verification of the facts?

LG: I think it’s worth lingering for a second on the remarkable program that Meta has proposed. There were a lot of things that were not perfect on this subject, and the factors of facts themselves had long-standing criticism of how the program worked. But in general, factors have treated this as a model for how platforms and journalists and independent fact auditors can work together, because it was created with a lot of contribution from them, and it was publicized by their professional association, the international network of verification of facts.

And in the midst of the criticism of the program, and the obvious fact that Meta only adopted it as a public relations strategy to resist intense criticisms they obtained following the 2016 elections and the Cambridge scandal Analytica, it is easy to neglect the fact of 2016 that it was a really cool program in many ways, and that we have not seen others like that. And if it is the first step in its elimination, it is really something to deplore in terms of erection of a sort of stable institution to provide the work and the contribution of these independent fact verifications, in moderation of the contents on platforms.

But more immediately, the consequences of the meta elimination in the United States – and potentially worldwide – include resources considerably reduced for fact verifiers, not only to support the work they do with Instagram and Facebook holes , but also their political relationships, and media literacy programs and their work with public agencies. It also means that lower disinformation and will circulate even more freely than on these networks. And although the factors of the facts could never follow the quantity of misleading messages which appeared on these networks, there are good evidence that when they intervened early enough, they could prevent certain claims from becoming viral. And I suspect that we will see a difference, and I think we are already starting to see a difference, although it is difficult to quantify.

KW: If it’s true, what do you think led to the decision to end the program?

LG: Listen, I think that the only reasonable interpretation is that Meta separates her relations with the verifications of the facts in the United States to appease the incoming Trump administration. And in a way, this should not be surprising, because, as I mentioned, the program was born only in order to appease the legislators of Washington in a different moment. But at the beginning, the concern concerned the effect that disinformation could have had in the 2016 elections and in a climate of increasing concerns concerning online disinformation in the world. Meta leaders considered that they should be considered as taking this question seriously, as a way to prevent the very real threat of more aggressive regulations, perhaps in the United States and also in the European Union.

And so we know that Meta’s content moderation policies and his approach to disinformation are very sensitive to political pressures. And people should not be surprised that with the new Trump administration having indicated that it is so clear that they will see these efforts as a kind of censorship. And that Meta – and Mark Zuckerberg – thought he could protect commercial interests by achieving this very visible and very public policy. I think there is no doubt that this is how we have to interpret it.

KW: What do you do with this involvement that the fact auditors were too politically biased?

LG: I think the first thing to say is that this line of attack on the Maga movement is nothing new, right? It is built very directly from a conservatism movement in the United States which started even before the Nixon administration, but that we associate with the criticism of Spiro Agnew on the “NATERING NABOBS OF NEGATIVISM. “This is a very organized and coherent effort and several decades to discredit consumer journalism as biased, and it is only the last iteration of this strategy. This was a successful strategy historically, and I think it was a successful strategy in this case.

KW: Well, now that the decision has been announced, what can we then expect in these fact verification organizations?

LG: Until now, this only applies to verifications of facts in the United States, but there are good reasons to fear that this is only the first step, and that the meta will gradually eliminate the world, including in Europe.

But in the United States, these outlets for verifying very well established facts will have considerably reduced income. And, you know, it will certainly mean that their budgets are much smaller, and they will have to fight to compensate for these budgets. And if they don’t, they will have to dismiss staff, and they will have to reduce a lot of their activities.

KW: Are you aware of estimates in the number of people who could lose their jobs on this subject?

LG: It’s really difficult to say, and probably irresponsible to throw numbers, but there is a wide range in the degree of dependence on this partnership. Some outlets depend very much on the meta income, and it is therefore not unreasonable to guess that if the program has disappeared overnight, somewhere between a quarter and a third of all global partners could disappear – or in The cases of the greatest organizations, get their facts in their arms. And even those who have more diverse sources of income should probably find other income or let people go.

KW: Do you have a meaning to find out if the philanthropic community, or one of the other platforms with a deep pocket, could we expect to fill the funding gap?

LG: I think that the news here is really not good, because even before Meta makes this move, I already heard verifiers of facts and adjacent organizations of facts that philanthropic funding became increasingly difficult to find . And you know, we could speculate on the reason why it is. It can be in response to public pressure or changing political winds. This is also the case that the philanthropic world is extremely silly, and a lot of attention has been paid to disinformation in the last five or six years, and I think it was entirely predictable that modes were going to change. So, even before this announcement, many of these organizations tried to anticipate something like that.

KW: Are there other elements of this story which, in your opinion, are missing so far by media coverage?

LG: Part of the feeling I saw in the American opinion pages and among the crowd of media criticisms was that “Well, it is lamentable, but the factors of the facts were never going to solve the problem disinformation in the first place. ” And I have always found this argument really frustrating, because factors have certainly never promised to be the response to online disinformation. And that really interrupts me that they are kept at the level that other journalists are not held.

Journalists in general accept that their work often reaches fewer people than it should, and that it does not have the impacts they hope. And it has always been a challenge to attract the public to the kind of serious journalism that we hope that it would attract.

This is also true for the facts of the facts, and it is completely predictable that politicians would ignore them as often as no, but I find it really difficult to accept the argument that we are not more badly without the people do not make a good faith effort to write articles on what is true. It just seems to me to be so close to the central journalism mission.