He also added that the result of the 2024 United States presidential election is one of the factors to signal a 'cultural tipping point' towards prioritizing speech instead of 'freedom moderation.'
For some, this move from Meta is part of a 'larger scheme,' in which these changes are driven and affected by political shifts, especially under the Trump administration, and business necessity to find more resources.
Spill Your Truth
According to Meta, users will have more 'freedom of speech' after lifting restrictions on mainstream topic discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal acts and heavy violations.
However, Meta's fact-check partners, such as FactCheck.org and Politifact, refuted and countered Zuckerberg's claim that fact-checking contributes to censorship and limiting social media users' opinions.
Politifact's Executive Director Aaron Sharockman stated that Meta's decision has 'nothing to do with free speech or censorship,' adding that the removal or penalization of accounts is done by Meta itself and not the fact-checkers.
"Our work isn't about censorship. We provide accurate information to help social media users as they navigate their news feeds. We did not, and could not, remove content. Any decisions to do that were Meta's,” Lori Robertson, another director from FactCheck.org.
Anti-Facebook Jail
Meta Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan defended the company's transition from a fact-checking to a community-driven model approach, making the users' insights more 'authentic and personalized,' especially to political content.
"Too much harmless content gets censored, too many people find themselves wrongly locked up in Facebook jail," Kaplan said.
Some fact-checkers agree that information disorders from the 'political right' are more fact-checked and labeled as problematic unlike those from the left, making it look like fact-checks are biased.
Ava Lee, Campaign Strategy Lead of Global Witness, argued that Meta's decision to sell the 'anti-censorship claim' of the company is a political move to avoid responsibility for the platform's political posts with hate and disinformation.
"Zuckerberg's announcement is a blatant attempt to cozy up to the incoming Trump administration–with harmful implications,” Lee added.
Meanwhile, Stephan Lewandowsky, a psychology professor who studies misinformation, considered Meta’s decision to be linked to US corporations to preemptively submit to Trump’s expected demands, attempting to remove the fact-checking and potentially the existence of factual information.
What is the Importance of fact-checking?
According to Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, 'fact-checking does work,' where multiple studies have proven that fact-checking partially reduces misconceptions and misperceptions about fake news.
He also added that sometimes, it is out of the control of the fact-checkers if they have believed a misperception in the first place, however, the job of the fact-checkers is to reduce their exposure to more information disorder.
A 2019 meta-analysis revealed that the effectiveness of fact-checking in over 200,000 people has a 'significantly positive overall influence on their political beliefs.
“We want journalists and fact-checkers to be making their best effort to establish what is true and what isn’t in a political discourse that is often filled with information from all kinds of sources from all over the political spectrum,” Lucas Graves, a journalism professor, cited.
How can we spot fake news?
For social media, Mike Caulfield of Washington State University Vancouver developed the SIFT method to simplify steps in dealing with reported news, especially to evaluate the posts if they are fabricated, manipulated, or even fake.
“We are also disappointed in Mr. Zuckerberg's false assertion that fact-checkers are politically biased and have fueled censorship. Fact-checkers were never given any ability to take down posts on Meta platforms…[we] instead, believe in the power of more information and more context to provide people on social media with tools to protect themselves against lies,” FactFirstPH said in a statement.
The SIFT method is essentially, following these 4 easy steps:
Stop. Don't read or share media until the source and author have been verified and double-checked.
Investigate the Source. Ensure that the materials are reliable, credible, and trustworthy.
Find better coverage. Do an independent search to find the best source and a variety of sources that cover that topic.
Trace claims, quotes, and media back to the original source. Rather than relying on reports from a single source, try to retrace and track down the original or primary source of the published content.
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