Four years ago, Meta blocked Donald Trump from posting on Facebook after his false claims of election fraud helped foment the January 6 assault on the US Capitol. Now Meta’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is “getting rid of fact-checkers” and switching to a system of X-style “Community Notes” in a bid to end “censorship”. “Fact-checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created,” Zuckerberg declared.
This alleged bias was evident in the choices external fact-checkers made about which posts on Meta to fact-check and how, Zuckerberg said. “Our system then attached real consequences... A programme intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.” The Community Notes system instead relies on establishing a consensus between “both sides” in a debate to verify contested claims. This “could be a better way of achieving our original intention of providing people with information about what they’re seeing—and one that’s less prone to bias,” Zuckerberg said.
Accusations of partisan bias in political fact-checking are commonplace on the right in the United States; the main complaint being that fact-checkers there focus more on claims from conservatives than liberals. The accusations that the selection of claims is a result of “bias” are unfair. And there is now a large body of academic work that shows what fact-checkers do and how they have a positive effect. But factchecking is of course an imperfect craft.
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