Disillusioned journalists, working as ‘factcheckers’ for Facebook are trying to end the media partnership, the Guardian reported on December 13th.
In short, current and former factcheckers told the Guardian that Facebook’s censorship via collaboration with outside contributors produced little to no results and that they’ve lost trust in the Social Media giant. It appeared that Facebook has also repeatedly refused to release any meaningful data about the impact of contributors’ work.
“They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR,” said Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, a factchecking site that has partnered with Facebook for two years. “They’re not taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck … They clearly don’t care.”
Binkowski said that on at least one occasion, Facebook encouraged fact-checkers to prioritize the debunking of information that hurt its advertisers.
A Facebook spokesperson repeatedly declined to comment on whether advertisers influenced factchecking, saying in an email, “The primary way we surface potentially false news to third-party factcheckers is via machine learning.”
Binkowski left Snopes earlier in 2018 and is now running her own factchecking site that doesn’t partner with Facebook, because according to her the Snopes-Facebook partnership quickly turned counterproductive.
The Guardian also cited Kim LaCaprita, a content manager and factchecker who left her job at Snopes due to her issues with Facebook. According to her, Facebook wanted the “appearance of trying to prevent damage without actually doing anything” and that she was particularly upset to learn that Facebook was paying Snopes:
“That felt really gross … Facebook has one mission and factchecking websites should have a completely different mission.”
Facebook began its partnership with Snopes and other news outlets such as the Associated Press, PolitiFact and the Weekly Standard in 2016, following the US Presidential election when fake stories and various political propaganda seemed to flood the social media.
The goal was to rely on mainstream journalists to flag ‘false news’ and limit their diffusion. However, it appeared that evidence proved that to be ineffective. Despite that Facebook claims that fake news on the platform are on a downward trend, citing several pieces of research.
These pieces of research used “different methodologies and definitions of false news, all three reports find that the overall volume of false news on Facebook is trending downward, and as Alcott, Gentzkow and Yu note, “efforts by Facebook following the 2016 election to limit the diffusion of misinformation may have had a meaningful impact.” Facebook did not fund or provide data for this research, which was conducted on publicly available data.”
Some news outlet leaders said that the relationship with Facebook was positive, while others said the results were unclear and they’ve started disliking the tech giant, especially following reports that the company had paid a consulting firm to go after opponents by making public their associations with George Soros.
“Why should we trust Facebook when it’s pushing the same rumors that its own factcheckers are calling fake news?” the Guardian cited an anonymous factchecker. “It’s worth asking how do they treat stories about George Soros on the platform knowing they specifically pay people to try to link political enemies to him?”
“Working with Facebook makes us look bad,” the anonymous journalist added.
The Guardian’s report received a response by Facebook, later on December 13th. It denied any of the allegations provided by the outlet’s sources and claimed that its disinformation initiatives were quite effective:
“Fact-checking is highly effective in fighting misinformation: when something is rated “false” by a fact-checker, we’re able to reduce future impressions of that content by an average of 80%. We also leverage these ratings to take action on Pages and websites that repeatedly share misinformation. We de-prioritize all content from actors who repeatedly get “false” ratings on content they share, and we remove their advertising and monetization rights.”
In regard to allegedly asking factcheckers to prioritize debunking content about advertisers, Facebook denied and provided a description of how factchecking actually works:
“In reality, here’s how fact-checking works: the primary way we surface potentially false news to third-party fact-checkers is via machine learning, which relies on a number of signals like feedback from people who use Facebook and the number of comments expressing disbelief (e.g., “No way this is real!”). Fact-checkers then go through a list of this potentially false content and choose for themselves what to fact-check — they are under no obligation to fact-check anything from the list, and if they’d like, they can rate stories that Facebook hasn’t added to the list (which they often do). As soon as something is rated “false,” it is automatically de-prioritized in News Feed, and where it does appear, we’ll show Related Articles including the fact-checker’s article below it. These processes are automated.”
Whether it is effective or not, is unclear – former and current contributors seem to claim it isn’t, while Facebook claims it is. The fact is that many conservative media sources and personalities have appeared targeted by the “unbiased factchecking” initiative.
