This 180-degree change is a response to Donald Trump’s imminent second presidential term and to the methods of the competition, such as X’s Community Notes. Meta decided not to invest any more money in its program. Now, it hopes that Facebook and Instagram users themselves will be the ones to decide what content is disinformation or not.
In the statement where Zuckerberg announced that he will dismantle the program, he said that fact-checkers succumbed to political bias, destroying more trust than they’d created in the US. However, for Laura Zommer, former director of Chequeado (one of the most important Spanish-speaking verifier organizations) and LatamChequea, and now leader of Factchequeado (a verification media aimed at the Latino community in the US), Zuckerberg’s statements are not a surprise, and he does not have scientific evidence for his claims. “Far from censoring, fact-checkers add context,” Zommer says. “We never advocate for removing content. We want citizens to have better information to make their own decisions.”
Zommer, who is skeptical of how the dissolution of this program might benefit Meta, emphasizes that the company contradicts itself by ending the fact-checking program, especially because it has highlighted its positive results in the past. Zommer also agrees with Angie Drobnic Holan, current director of IFCN, who, in a LinkedIn post, wrote: “It’s unfortunate that this decision comes in the wake of extreme political pressure from a new administration and its supporters. Factcheckers have not 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.”
As Trump, just days away from his inauguration, threatens a mass deportation of migrants, the Hispanic community is facing a possible new wave of disinformation. “The evidence makes us think this will be bad. Until it is implemented we will see, but we can say that, during the Trump campaign, one of the main disinformation narratives was against migrants, such as those that said migrants would commit fraud. That was false. The data from the past makes us think that this decision is likely to negatively affect Latino communities in the US,” Zommer tells WIRED en Español.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric is not the only thing endangering the ecosystem. In an age where deepfake video and audio scams are spreading, having viable information will be a priority.
Spanish-Speaking Fact-Checking Media at Risk
The Latin American news ecosystem, with its economic vulnerability, is at risk. “Facebook’s fact-checker program payments were still keeping fact-checking organizations and news organizations with a fact-checking section afloat. So I think that, most likely, if these organizations don’t manage to diversify soon, many of them are going to disappear,” says Pablo Medina, disinformation research editor at the Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, CLIP.
While the decision applies only to the US for now, the disappearance of the project has raised alarm in the Hispanic media ecosystem. “The attack expressed by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg on what he called ‘secret courts’ that promote censorship of the platform in Latin America—a false claim—indicates that Brazil is a key focus of the company’s concerns,” says Tai Nalon, CEO of Aos Fatos, one of the most important fact-checking media in the global south.
“This is completely in line with the rhetoric of Donald Trump, a regular detractor of journalism and fact-checking,” Nalon says. “The arguments used by Zuckerberg have been widely exploited by the far right around the world to delegitimize effective initiatives against disinformation. Since there has never been dissatisfaction with the work of fact-checkers before, this seems to me to be a move aimed at gaining some political advantage. We know that Meta is facing antitrust cases in the US, and being close to the government could be an advantage for the company.”
Meanwhile, as Laura Zommer says, evidence from the past gives the news ecosystem reason to worry.
WIRED en español contacted Meta for this story. Through a media representative, the company replied with the statement (in Spanish) of the decision and said that this does not apply to WhatsApp and is only for US verifiers.
This story originally appeared on WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.
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