Australian politicians and experts have expressed concern over Meta’s decision to abandon factchecking on its platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, saying the move would “turbocharge” the spread of lies and hate speech around the world.
Meta’s billionaire founder, Mark Zuckerberg, announced overnight Australia-time that the company’s factchecking programs would be scrapped. In a video message, Zuckerberg vowed to prioritise free speech after the return of Donald Trump to the White House and said that, starting in the US, he would “get rid of factcheckers and replace them with community notes similar to X”.
Meta has been accused of caving to political pressure from the incoming Trump administration in the US.
More political content will be pushed on to the platforms while certain restrictions will be removed for subjects including immigration and gender, under changes announced by the tech billionaire.
Why did Mark Zuckerberg end Facebook and Instagram’s factchecking program?
The Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said Meta’s decision to abandon factchecking would create a “free-for-all on misinformation, disinformation, abuse and trolling”.
The Greens’ communications spokesperson told ABC radio the changes were “dangerous”.
“This is a very dangerous move at a time when members of the community, parents, young people, women in particular, are increasingly concerned of the unsafe environment on these big platforms.”
Political communication expert Dr Emma Briant said “ordinary citizens should be very concerned”.
“With at least 13 billionaires in his new administration, including big tech oligarchs like [Elon] Musk, Trump has sent a powerful message across America’s wealthy right-wing elite – now is your time, not theirs,” the Monash University associate professor said.
“Clearly Mark Zuckerberg heard him loud and clear.”
Australia is in the crosshairs of Zuckerberg and Musk after it passed world-first legislation to ban under-16s from accessing their platforms.
The federal government is also introducing a new scheme to force digital platforms, including Meta, to pay publishers for Australian news.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, signalled the federal government would stand firm against any potential blowback from Trump to its social media crackdown.
“The social media ban is an Australian policy in the interests of young Australians, Australian families,” he told ABC News Breakfast on Wednesday.
“And we say to Australian parents: we’ve got your back. We’ve listened, we’ve engaged with you on this. This is a sensible reform that has passed the parliament and is now Australian law.”
The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, said “access to trusted information has never been more important”.
“That’s why the Albanese government is supporting high quality, fact-checked information for the public through ongoing support to ABC, SBS, and AAP,” she said.
Meta’s factchecking program typically involves journalists at internationally accredited agencies investigating and reviewing claims on social media through rigorous questioning, consideration of evidence and verification using multiple sources.
Posts deemed “false” or “altered” have a factcheck article appended to them and may receive reduced distribution across Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
Australian Associated Press said on Wednesday its factchecking agency AAP FactCheck’s contract with Meta was not impacted by the US decision and its work would continue in 2025.
“Independent factcheckers are a vital safeguard against the spread of harmful misinformation and disinformation that threatens to undermine free democratic debate in Australia and aims to manipulate public opinion,” AAP’s chief executive, Lisa Davies, said.
Lizzie O’Shea, the Digital Rights Watch chair, said Meta’s response highlighted a contradiction. The social media giant has previously claimed that users do not engage in news and current affairs content on its platform to justify not renewing deals with Australian media outlets as part of the news media bargaining code.
“The government needs to look at regulatory responses that allow for investment in high quality news content, and that we can no longer assume, if we ever did, that large social media platforms will be good faith partners in that project,” O’Shea said.
“I think this has very serious negative implications, because it means that polarising and extremist content, things like mis- and disinformation content on hot button political issues … will become more prevalent on the platform.”
O’Shea suggested a big tech tax on companies like Meta and X could help fund high quality journalism and misinformation education to counter the rise of any disinformation and extremist content.
In the UK, Imran Ahmed, the founder and chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said Meta’s decision would cause “real-world harm”.
“By abandoning its factchecking program in favour of a discredited ‘community notes’ system, Meta is turbocharging the spread of unchallenged online lies, worsening the spread of hate, and creating more risks to our communities, democracy, public health, and the safety of our kids.”
Ahmed said Meta had effectively abdicated its responsibility to try to prevent the spread of misinformation, hate speech and violent online content.
“Meta is now saying it’s up to you to spot the lies on its platforms, and that it’s not their problem if you can’t tell the difference, even if those lies, hate, or scams end up hurting you.”
The Director of the International Fact-Checking Network, Angie Drobnic Holan, based in Washington DC, rejected as a canard the allegation that factcheckers had been biased in their work.
“That attack line comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.
“Factchecking journalism has never censored or removed posts: it’s added information and context to controversial claims and it’s debunked hoax content and conspiracy theories. The factcheckers used by Meta follow a code of principles requiring nonpartisanship and transparency.”
Holan said Meta’s decision had come in the wake of “extreme political pressure” from the incoming Trump administration and its supporters.
“This decision will hurt social media users who are looking for accurate, reliable information to make decisions about their everyday lives and interactions with friends and family.”
Meta’s overhaul comes just days out from the inauguration of the US president-elect, Donald Trump, with whom Zuckerberg has vowed to work to fight foreign governments attempting to censor online content.
Meta to get rid of factcheckers and recommend more political content
Zuckerberg has recently sought to repair a tumultuous relationship with Trump – who once threatened Zuckerberg that he would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he interfered with the 2024 election. Zuckerberg visited Trump after his election win in November and oversaw a US$1m Meta donation to Trump’s inauguration fund.
Musk, the owner of X, is already part of Trump’s inner circle.
“The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritising speech,” Zuckerberg said in a video posted to social media.
“So, we’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms.”
Additional reporting Australian Associated Press
The first report in CEPR’s Monitoring International Integration series focused on the decline of trust in Europe’s established political institutions and a surge in support for populist movements and policies (Dustmann et al. 2017). As discussed in VoxEU.org’s Debate on Populism, the recent rise of populism in Europe was driven by different factors including globalisation, automation, the global financial crisis and austerity policies that followed, the rise of immigration, and other forces related to identity and cultural divides. In addition, a potentially important driver of populism is the spread of mobile internet and social media that facilitates the dissemination of populist messages (Zhuravskaya et al. 2020).
In order to limit the dissemination of such ‘alternative facts’ – a term first used by Donald Trump’s advisor, Kellyanne Conway – countries such as Germany and France have introduced laws allowing regulators to block social networking accounts and sites. Many media and independent organisations have started large-scale fact-checking efforts. However, recent research suggests that fact-checking does not always work as expected. First, fact-checking may be too slow, as false news circulates particularly fast (Vosoughi et al. 2018). Second, ex post fact-checking may be too late, since it proves difficult to correct beliefs after an audience’s exposure to false or misleading statements (Swire et al. 2017, Nyhan et al. 2019, Barrera et al. 2020).
In order to slow the sharing of such alternative facts on social networks, one needs to understand the determinants of sharing, and particularly whether fact-checking can have an impact on the sharing of ‘alternative facts’. In our recent paper (Henry et al. 2020), we carried out an online randomised experiment to study the impact of fact-checking on Facebook users’ sharing of alternative facts.
In May 2019, in the context of the European Parliament elections, we used the Qualtrics platform to contact a representative sample of French voters with Facebook accounts. We first showed them misleading statements on the EU (with links to the exact source) made by the leaders of the extreme-right party Rassemblement National (RN). Until June 2018, this party was known as Front National; it was and still is led by Marine Le Pen. The first statement claimed that 87% of French laws come from European directives; the second stated that the EU sought to bring in 50 million immigrants to Europe by 2050. After seeing those statements, a randomly drawn third of the subjects were exposed to fact-checking information related to these statements, compiled from media sources – we refer to this treatment as “Imposed Fact-Check”. Another third was given the choice of viewing or not viewing this fact-checking information – we call this treatment the “Voluntary Fact-Check”. The remaining third (the “Alt-Facts” treatment) was not shown fact-checking information nor given an option to access it.
After being exposed to the ‘alternative facts’ and possibly to the fact-checking, participants had the opportunity to share the ‘alternative facts’ on Facebook. We found that exposing individuals to fact-checking information, or providing them with the opportunity to fact-check themselves, reduces sharing of ‘alternative facts’ by more than 25%. While the sharing rate is 14.7% in the Alt-Fact treatment, it falls to 10.2% in the Imposed Fact-Check treatment (the left-hand side panel of Figure 1). In the Voluntary Fact-Check treatment, where the users can choose whether to view fact-checking or not, the average rate of sharing is 10.8%, a rate not statistically different from the one in the Imposed Fact-Check treatment.
We also show that participants in these two treatments share the fact-checking information at similar rates: in the Imposed Fact-Check treatment, 14.3% participants share fact-checking, while the respective average sharing rate in the Voluntary Fact-Check is 11.5% (see the right-hand side panel of Figure 1). The difference between these two rates of sharing fact-checking information is only marginally statistically significant, and the magnitude of the difference is small. This is striking because in the Voluntary Fact-Check treatment, only 39% of participants chose to view the fact-checking information and thus had an option to share it.
Figure 1 The effect of imposed and voluntary fact-checking on sharing of false news and fact-checking information on social media
Our study identifies another important solution to slowing the dissemination of ‘alternative facts’. In our experiment, in order to share the ‘alternative facts’ via their Facebook account, users have to go through several clicks. We find that each additional click reduces the number of potential sharers by about 75%. This implies that social media sharing is very sensitive to even small non-monetary costs. Therefore, there is a scope for demanding additional clicks; for example, asking to confirm the willingness to share non-fact-checked information.
Figure 2 The effect of additional clicks required to share false news on social media
References
Barrera, O, S Guriev, E Henry and E Zhuravskaya (2020), “Facts, alternative facts, and fact checking in times of post-truth politics”, Journal of Public Economics, 182: 104–123.
Dustmann, C, B Eichengreen, S Otten, A Sapir, G Tabellini and G Zoega (2017), “Europe’s Trust Deficit: Causes and Remedies”, London: CEPR Press.
Henry, E and E Zhuravskaya and S Guriev (2020), “Checking and Sharing Alt-Facts” CEPR Discussion Paper 14378.
Nyhan, B, E Porter, J Reifler and T Wood (2019), “Taking Fact-Checks Literally But Not Seriously? The Effects of Journalistic Fact-Checking on Factual Beliefs and Candidate Favorability”, Political Behavior.
Swire, B, A Berinsky, S Lewandowsky and U Ecker (2017), “Processing political misinformation: comprehending the Trump phenomenon”, Royal Society Open Science, 4(3).
Vosoughi, S, D Roy and S Aral (2018), “The spread of true and false information online”, Science, 359: 1146–1151.
Zhuravskaya, E, M Petrova and R Enikolopov (2020), “Political Effects of the Internet and Social Media”, Annual Review of Economics, Forthcoming.
