A prominent fact-checking organization used by Facebook to moderate political content responded to news that it will revamp its fact-checking to better prevent bias with an article outlining its disappointment and disagreement with the measure.
“Lead Stories was surprised and disappointed when he first heard about the end of the Meta Third-Party Fact-Checking Partnership of which Lead Stories has been a part since 2019 through media reports and a press release,” says Lead Stories editor Maarten Schenk wrote Tuesday in response to an announcement from Meta that it would significantly change its fact-checking process to “restore free speech”.
Lead Stories, a Facebook fact-checker that employs several former CNN alumni including Alan Duke and Ed Payne, has become one of the more prominent fact-checkers Facebook has used in recent years.
Fox News digital first reported On Tuesday, Meta announced that Meta is ending its fact-checking program and lifting restrictions on speech to “restore” free speech on Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting that current moderation practices content ‘have gone too far’.
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“After Trump was first elected in 2016, traditional media wrote nonstop about how disinformation was a threat to democracy,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video message on Tuesday. “We have attempted in good faith to address these concerns without becoming the arbiters of the truth. But fact-checkers have simply been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they have created, especially in the US.”
“What political bias?” the Lead Stories article wonders before explaining that it is “disappointing to hear Mark Zuckerberg accuse the organizations in Meta’s US fact checking program of being “too politically biased.”
“Especially since one of Meta’s requirements for being part of a partnership included having signed the IFCN’s Code of Principles, which explicitly requires a ‘commitment to impartiality and fairness,’” the article said. Since becoming part of the partnership, we and the IFCN have never received any complaints from Meta about any political bias, so we were quite surprised by this statement.”
Meta said in its announcement that it will move toward a system of moderation more in line with Community Notes at X, which Lead Stories seemed to struggle with.
“However, in our experience and that of others, Community Notes on . “In the end, the truth doesn’t matter about consensus or agreement: the shape of the Earth remains the same even if social media users can’t agree on it.”
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Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, arrives to testify before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, “Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis,” in Washington, DC, on January 31, 2024. (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)
Lead Stories added that Community Notes is “completely non-transparent about its contributors: readers are left guessing about their biases, funding, loyalty, sources, or expertise and there is no avenue for appeal or correction,” while “fact-checkers on the other hand However, IFCN requires that they be fully transparent about who they are, who funds them and what methodology and sources they use to reach their conclusions.”
Schenk added: “Fact checking is about adding verified and sourced information so people can decide what to believe. It is an essential part of freedom of expression.”
In a statement to Fox News Digital, Duke said Lead Stories plans to continue.
“Lead Stories will continue, although we will have to reduce our production without support from Meta,” said Duke. “We operate globally and the majority of our operations are now outside the US. We publish in eight languages other than English, and that will have an impact.”
Some conservatives took to social media to criticize Lead Stories over their article lamenting the change at Meta after years of conservative backlash against Facebook’s fact-checkers as a whole over major news stories, including the oppression of the bomb threat on Hunter Biden’s laptop.
“Of all the fact-checking companies, Lead Stories is the worst,” says British-American conservative writer Ian Haworth posted on X. “I couldn’t be happier that they will be circling the drain soon.”
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(Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The director of Politifact, a fact-checker also used by Facebook, gave a strong rebuke from Zuckerberg after Tuesday’s announcement.
“If Meta is angry, it has created a tool to censor, it should look in the mirror,” Aaron Sharockman said in a statement he posted to X after Zuckerberg’s announcement.
Sharockman fumed: “The decision to remove independent journalists from Facebook’s content moderation program in the United States has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. Mark Zuckerberg’s decision could not be less subtle.”
He dismissed Zuckerberg’s charge of political bias, arguing that Meta’s platforms, not fact-checkers, were the entities that actually censored messages.
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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg once claimed that Facebook had suppressed 18 million posts containing “misinformation” about COVID-19. (David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
“Let me be clear: the decision to remove or penalize a post or account is made by Meta and Facebook, not fact-checkers. They created the rules,” Sharockman said.
At the end of his Lead Stories post, Schenk wrote: “While we are clearly disappointed by this news, Lead Stories would like to thank the many people at Meta we have worked with over the years and will continue our fact-checking mission. to paraphrase the tagline on our main page: ‘Just because it’s trending now without a fact-check label doesn’t make it true.'”
Gabriel Hays and Brooke Singman of Fox News Digital contributed to this report.
