Tech giant Meta’s shock announcement that it is ending its US fact-checking programme triggered scathing criticism on Tuesday from disinformation researchers who warned it risked opening the floodgates for false narratives.

Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced the company was going to “get rid” of its third-party fact-checkers in the United States, in a sweeping policy shift that analysts saw as an attempt to appease US President-elect Donald Trump.

“This is a major step back for content moderation at a time when disinformation and harmful content are evolving faster than ever,” said Ross Burley, co-founder of the nonprofit Centre for Information Resilience.

Fact-checking and disinformation research have long been a hot-button issue in a hyper-polarised political climate in the United States, with conservative US advocates saying they were a tool to curtail free speech and censor right-wing content.

Trump’s Republican Party and his billionaire ally Elon Musk – the owner of social media giant X, formerly Twitter – have long echoed similar complaints.

“While efforts to protect free expression are vital, removing fact-checking without a credible alternative risks opening the floodgates to more harmful narratives,” Burley said.

As an alternative, Zuckerberg said Meta’s platforms, Facebook and Instagram, would use “Community Notes similar to X” in the US.

Community Notes is a crowd-sourced moderation tool that X has promoted as the way for users to add context to posts, but researchers have repeatedly questioned its effectiveness in combating falsehoods.

“You wouldn’t rely on just anyone to stop your toilet from leaking, but Meta now seeks to rely on just anyone to stop misinformation from spreading on their platforms,” Michael Wagner, from the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told AFP.

“Asking people, pro bono, to police the false claims that get posted on Meta’s multi-billion dollar social media platforms is an abdication of social responsibility.”

Meta’s announcement represents a financial setback for its US-based third-party fact-checkers.

Meta’s programme and external grants have been “predominant revenue streams” for global fact-checkers, according to a 2023 survey by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) of 137 organisations across dozens of countries.

The decision will also “hurt social media users who are looking for accurate, reliable information to make decisions about their everyday lives and interactions,” said IFCN director Angie Holan.

“It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of external political pressure from a new administration and its supporters,” Holan added.

Meta’s announcement was cheered by conservative supporters of Trump, who said the move had “probably” been in response to his threats against the company and Zuckerberg.

Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn posted on X that Meta’s move was “a ploy to avoid being regulated”.

Aaron Sharockman, executive director of US fact-checking organisation PolitiFact, rejected the contention that fact-checking was a tool to suppress free speech.

The role of US fact-checkers, he said, was to provide “additional speech and context to posts that journalists found to contain misinformation” and it was up to Meta to decide what penalties users faced.

“The great thing about free speech is that people are able to disagree about any piece of journalism we post,” Sharockman said.

“If Meta is upset it created a tool to censor, it should look in the mirror.”

PolitiFact is one of the early partners that worked with Facebook to launch the fact-checking programme in the United States in 2016.

AFP also currently works in 26 languages with Facebook’s fact-checking programme, in which Facebook pays to use fact-checks from around 80 organisations globally on its platform, WhatsApp and on Instagram.

In that programme, content rated “false” is downgraded in news feeds so fewer people will see it and if someone tries to share that post, they are presented with an article explaining why.

- Agence France-Presse