“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts,” the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York wrote four decades ago.
That seems like a simpler time — especially when you consider Meta’s decision to end a fact-checking program on social media apps Facebook, Instagram and Threads and what the consequences could be for an industry built on clarity and search for the truth yourself.
Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week was widely seen in news verification circles as a genuflection to newly elected President Donald Trump, whose first term popularized the term “alternative facts.”
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Meta is replacing its fact-checking with a “community notes” system reminiscent of X, where it relies on users to correct misinformation on its platforms. In a sense, this harks back to ‘he said-she said’ journalism, or to the view among some moderators of political debates that it should be the role of opponents, not journalists, to point out untruths. It also points to something else: the idea that the loudest voices and the best told stories can win.
This moment is a crossroads for the fact-checking industry, whose influence will be sharply curtailed when Trump takes office for his second term.
“In the short term, this is bad news for people who want to use social media to find reliable and accurate information,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network. Her organization started with about 50 members in 2015 and now has 170, some of whom are facing staff cuts and possible closure due to Meta’s move.
“In the long term,” she said, “I think it’s very uncertain what this will all mean.”
Fact checking in the media is several decades old
Fact checking is a strange industry, especially when you consider that it is a function of all journalism. The concept emerged about three decades ago, in part to counter “he said-she said” narratives and monitor claims in political advertisements. The organization FactCheck.org, whose primary purpose was to help reporters, started in 2003, and the more public-oriented PolitiFact four years later.
PolitiFact, founded by then-Tampa Bay Times Washington bureau chief Bill Adair in 2007, won a Pulitzer Prize for its 2008 campaign reporting. It called out politicians for bending or breaking the truth in ways that were often difficult for reporters who protected the sources whose voices populated their stories.
In 2012, fact-checkers came under attack, mainly by Republicans who believed many were biased and researched voting results to prove the point, said Adair, now a professor at Duke University. Trump, he said, “accelerated a trend that had already begun.”
Some conservative suspicion of fact-checkers is justified because of mistakes that were made, although there were some Republicans who expressed falsehoods and simply didn’t like being called out for them, said Steve Hayes, CEO and editor of the center-right party. site The Shipping.
“The people who do fact-checking are in a sense saying, ‘We are the arbiter of the truth, period,’” Hayes said. “And every time you do this, it invites scrutiny of the work that you do .”
Labeling systems largely didn’t help either. Labeling a misrepresentation “pants on fire,” as some fact-checkers have done, can be a catchy way to grab attention, but it can also breed resentment.
Holan pushes back against the view that fact-checkers have been biased in their work: “That line of attack comes from those who believe they should be able to exaggerate and lie without rebuttal or contradiction.”
People think that even with fact checking, the truth remains elusive
The GOP suspicion still quickly took root. Journalism’s Poynter Institute found in a 2019 survey that 70% of Republicans thought the work of fact-checkers was one-sided. About the same percentage of Democrats thought they were fair. Poynter hasn’t asked the same question since. Still, Poynter found last year that 52% of Americans say they generally find it difficult to determine whether what they read about elections is true or not.
In a column Wednesday on the conservative watchdog site NewsBusters.org, Tim Graham wrote that during the first nine months of 2024, PolitiFact criticized Republican officials for presenting “mostly false” facts 88 times, compared to 31 times for Democrats. For Graham, this proves that the idea of the site being independent or impartial is laughable.
But is that prejudice? Or is it fact checking?
Adair has always been reluctant to say what is now the title of his new book: “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do it More, and How it Could Burn Down Our Democracy.” He no longer hesitates.
“Trump is unparalleled as a liar in American politics,” Adair said. “I’m not the first to say that. I think he has taken advantage of the backlash against fact-checkers and shown other politicians that you can get away with lying, so go ahead and do that.”
The tension over fact-checking played out during the recent presidential campaign, when Trump’s team was furious with ABC News for highlighting false statements made by the former president during his only debate with Democrat Kamala Harris.
Trump’s second victory has changed the equation at Meta. X has already curtailed its independent fact-checking under owner Elon Musk, a Trump ally. These steps are important because it eliminates the need for fact-checking in places where many users might not otherwise be exposed to it.
By itself, fact-checking “does not reach those exposed to misinformation,” says Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania, who founded FactCheck.org. “It tends to reach an audience that was already well informed and wary.”
On social media, fact-checking also became part of the algorithms that sent information to or away from people. Material found to be fake was often downgraded, reducing its exposure. For Republicans who criticized Big Tech, that amounted to censorship. But for Jamieson, successful fact-checking isn’t censorship – “it’s the process of arguing.”
Jamieson expressed some optimism that other savvy social media users will act to prevent the dangerous spread of untruths. But for fact-checking to continue to thrive as it is today and even survive as a journalistic effort, Adair said it will likely require influential Republican figures to publicly stand up for the importance of the truth.
NewsBuster columnist Graham had more pointed advice in an interview. “My remedy for all discussions about trust in the media,” he said, “is that humility is required.”
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David Bauder writes about media for the AP. Follow him up http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social
