With naked self-interest back in vogue, Meta wasted little effort disguising its prostration at the feet of King Donald. Attempts to spin the tech giant’s desire to evade scrutiny and regulation were largely confined to CEO Mark Zuckerberg showcasing his new Maga-friendly belief in “masculine energy”, and trying to appear less of a video-game nerd by advocating real-life pursuits, such as pig hunting and martial arts, that closely resemble video games. The less entertaining, but more alarming, part came in Meta’s threadbare justification for ending third-party fact-checking on Facebook, Instagram and Threads in the US.
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, claimed that since launching its fact-checking programme in 2016 the company had been shocked to discover that the checkers were human beings with “their own biases”. In their progressive zealotry, they had suppressed legitimate political discussion. It was time to get back to Meta’s roots which, apparently, were “free speech”—such as the freedom to make “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation”. From now on, content moderation would be performed, as it is on Elon Musk’s X, by community notes: contextual matter from whoever might care to supply it, from which a consensus view is generated.
Fact-checker. It sounds like a job from another age. One imagines editorial worker bees in the offices of the grand old American magazines, scanning through leather-bound volumes—dictionaries of miscellany and quotations, encyclopaedias with gilded pages. Smart, serious ladies with pinned up hair and spectacles; mild-looking men capable, nonetheless, of ferocious particularity.
With Wikipedia offering a more robust model for crowd-sourced verification, and Musk declaring to his followers on X that “the legacy media is pure propaganda. You are the media now”, maybe fact-checking is old—or, rather, impeccably mid-century—hat. Or it would be, were it not for the chronic dependence that Musk (who has merrily admitted that “some of the things I say” to his 217m followers “will be incorrect”) and other social media users have on reposting, rebutting, defending, quoting, misquoting or pilfering the work of that same legacy media.
Resources being what they are, in the British press fact-checking is usually the job not of specialists or independent third-party organisations but of researchers, sub-editors, desk and copy editors, and various others. Writers are encouraged to supply linked citations and, while reference books still have their place, it is generally about turbo-googling—chasing verification via at least one good primary source such as a research paper, academic journal or book, or direct from the person or organisation concerned, or at least two credible secondary ones. The latter usually come from other mainstream media.
It is a time-consuming task. If you want a sense of why, print out an article, highlight every verifiable or contestable statement—every name, date and number, every spelling, every statistic, every assertion that “this is so”, every quotation—and mark them off as you check them. Even those with the neatest handwriting (not me) will leave the page a barely legible morass of ticks, crosses and circlings, question marks, scrawled notes and heaped marginalia.
It can be a pleasant pastime, chasing words and numbers like some terrier for the truth, especially if you uncover a mistake or problem no one else has noticed before. But it is essentially a defensive operation, designed to mitigate not just the journalistic trade’s nefarious tradition of actively making stuff up, but the inherent shakiness of the news-gathering enterprise. News cycles create intense, relentless time pressure. As such, the field is open for the full variety of human folly: errors not just in names, words and numbers, but of misinterpretation and misattribution; of inclusion and of omission; errors born of a lack of specialist knowledge, or too much of it; errors resulting from being too hostile, or too indulgent; and, last but not least, errors that might put you in court.
In this light, fact-checking is not so much journalism’s way of being right than of being less wrong. It is a vulgar cousin of the double-blind scientific study, the Socratic dialogue or other forms of scholarly disputation. It is not always that something must be “correct” to pass a fact-check. After all, opinion and argument are the lifeblood of journalism. But the writer must be able to make their case without relying on demonstrable falsehood.
Far from stymieing free expression, fact-checking enables it by rooting public discourse in a common standard for, if not the truth itself, then what the truth plausibly might be. Without that, you have what online content so often is: a cacophony of attention-seeking lies. Fact-checking is a commitment, however caveated or compromised, to being a net good for public discussion. Engaging in this work isn’t just a difference of degrees from X’s fiscally and politically convenient post-truth model of “that’s just, like, your opinion man…”, or blether about “legitimate debate” and “giving everyone a voice”. It is the difference between a good-faith actor and a bad-faith or indifferent one.
It is also a promise not to wholly treat the reader, viewer or listener as a schmuck. Whatever you think of the murkier parts of the mainstream press and how roughly or cynically they prosecute their agendas (or those of their owners), ultimately they take their audience seriously because otherwise they would lose them. Social media platforms have little such obligation with a user base so vast and amorphous, and because at heart social media is an unserious thing whose fundamental purpose is to keep people scrolling. Meta’s fluffy sentiments about “bringing people closer together” and slightly firmer-sounding ones about free speech express the same desire for captive users. That is, bringing people together in order to have their lives wasted by algorithms precision-tooled to keep their attention.
Also buried in these platitudes is a whiny affirmation of something true: publishing is difficult. And while asking Meta and X to police everything on their sites may be akin to asking Thames Water to run a clean and fragrant sewer, but there is plenty that they definitely can do, say against bots and false accounts, or the mechanisms that encourage peddling or consuming extreme (and likely untruthful) content. Social media, as per Musk’s declaration, is now a primary news source for many, especially young people. It should incur commensurate responsibilities.
Aspiring to a standard of objective truth that we can apprehend, however imperfectly, is not a liberal conceit to censor conceptions of what is possible or permissible, but a necessary condition for collective human endeavour. If you don’t contribute to that by making a serious effort against disseminating falsehood then, like Zuckerberg, Musk and the other moral vacuums running Big Tech, far from standing for free speech or giving people a voice, you stand for nothing but your own advancement, regardless of the cost. Fact.
