How do fact-checks influence political beliefs and actions? A meta analysis of a Facebook tool that removes the false: Verified by Animal Poltico label
Facebook’s tool wouldn’t remove the original content but would add a label such as “False: Verified by Animal Poltico”, which would argue that the content was false. Meta claimed that once a post received the label, its reach was drastically reduced. “We know that this program is working and that users find value in the labels after a fact-checker rates them,” reads an official Meta post. The original posts were not deleted to show confidence in the IFCN organizations that did this work.
The company said that the move was to stop fact checkers from being political. Everyone has their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how,” Meta’s chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan wrote on 7 January.
For example, a 2019 meta-analysis of the effectiveness of fact-checking in more than 20,000 people found a “significantly positive overall influence on political beliefs”1.
“Ideally, we’d want people to not form misperceptions in the first place,” adds van der Linden. Reducing it is almost as effective as it gets if we have to work with the people who are already exposed.
Alexios Mantzarlis is a former fact-checker and directs the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech in New York City.
On Facebook, articles and posts deemed false by fact-checkers are currently flagged with a warning. They are also shown to fewer users by the platform’s suggestion algorithms, Mantzarlis says, and people are more likely to ignore flagged content than to read and share it.
Flagging posts as problematic could also have knock-on effects on other users that are not captured by studies of the effectiveness of fact-checks, says Kate Starbird, a computer scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. She says that measuring the direct effect of labels on user beliefs and actions is a different thing than measuring the broader effects of fact checks.
“It’s largely because the conservative misinformation is the stuff that is being spread more,” he says. “When one party, at least in the United States, is spreading most of the misinformation, it’s going to look like fact-checks are biased because they’re getting called out way more.”
The “news” that was being debunked was photos or videos taken out of context, such as one that falsely claimed that a group of migrants had hijacked a truck in Chiapas. There were also lies about alleged kidnappings of children in Mexico and other Latin American countries. Then came the Covid-19 disease. Independent fact-checkers took on a leading role in debunking, with the available data, ideas such as “drinking bleach eliminates the virus” or “5G networks caused the pandemic.”
I was an editorial supervisor at Animal Político’s El Sabueso when Meta approached us to start the project. To join, you had to join the Poynter Institute certification, which set the editorial rules for verification, and which is funded by the International Fact-Checking Network. Meta trusted the network for the project, as well as its own requirements. Political discourse or any type of content classified as an opinion can not be questioned. Statements by Lpez Obrador cannot be questioned, except for misinformation about the first migrant caravan, which crossed Mexico in the first year of theAMLO’s six-year term.
On January 7th, the program ended in the United States and everything changed. It seems only a matter of time before the initiative disappears in Latin America and the rest of the world, undermining independent news organizations that depend, to a greater or lesser extent, on that funding. Among those who would be affected will be Animal Político in Mexico; Chequeado in Argentina; Agencia Lupa or Aos Fatos in Brazil; and Maldita.es in Spain. The company thought that it needed to get rid of something that was working.
The project seemed to be working in the US and the rest of the world. According to its data, there are more than 100 international organizations actively participating in it. Indeed, last year, in the context of the European Union parliamentary elections, Meta announced the effectiveness of its labeling system: “Between July and December 2023, for example, nearly 68 million posts on Facebook and Instagram had fact-checking labels. 95 percent of people did not click on the content when it was labeled false or misleading.
As part of his counteroffensive, the company created the Third Party Fact-Checkers, or Independent Fact-checkers, program to address misinformation on its platforms.
It was the year 2016 and the problem of fake news kept Facebook’s CEO up at night. The US legal system was constantly questioning the young entrepreneur because he was under pressure from the media. Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential race, accusations of Russian election interference, and the Cambridge Analytica case raised serious concerns. For the first time, the issue of the platform’s influence on the political landscape was addressed by US lawmakers. Eventually, Zuckerberg would appear before the Senate in 2018.