When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this week that the social media giant would eliminate third-party fact-checking and facilitate moderation of sensitive topics, he described the decision as reflecting the spirit of the times.

Zuckerberg said that the re-election of US President-elect Donald Trump represents a “cultural turning point” towards freedom of expression at the expense of moderation.

In many ways, he was right.

Less than a decade after the rise of Donald Trump and Brexit, which prompted US tech platforms to crack down on online misinformation, momentum has shifted dramatically in favor of voices demanding a less regulated, freer internet.

“This move by Meta is certainly part of a larger trend, where fact-checking is facing some headwinds globally,” John P. Wehby, associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University in Canada, told Al Jazeera.

“My feeling is that the changes are driven equally by political shifts and business imperatives, with news organizations also needing to move scarce resources to serve audiences in other ways.”

If not over, the era of official fact-checking initiatives at least appears to be in decline.

After tripling in less than a decade, the number of active fact-checking projects worldwide peaked in 2022 at 457, according to data compiled by Duke Reporters Lab.

Even Google searches for the terms “fact-checked” and “misinformation” reached their highest levels in 2020 and 2022, respectively, according to an analysis of search data by US election statistician and forecaster Nate Silver.

For fact-checking projects that have weathered financial and political headwinds thus far, Meta’s move raises questions about their continued viability given that many of the initiatives have relied on funding from the tech giant.

Meta spent $100 million between 2016 and 2022 to support fact-checking programs accredited by the International Fact-Checking Network, according to the company.

Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, Elon Musk, one of Trump’s staunchest allies, has dragged the political center of X, formerly Twitter, sharply to the right, touting the platform’s intentions going well.

Getting closer to Trump

Disinformation experts denounced Meta’s move and accused Zuckerberg of cozying up to Trump — who frequently accuses Big Tech and legacy media of colluding with his liberal opponents — just as he is about to take power.

“I view Meta’s decision as part of a broader move among US companies to preemptively submit to Trump’s expected demands, which will of course include trying to abolish not only the idea of ​​fact-checking but also the existence of facts,” said Stefan Lewandowski, a professor of psychology at the University of Bristol who studies misinformation. For Al Jazeera channel.

“This is a standard step in the autocrat’s playbook because it eliminates any possibility of accountability and prevents evidence-based debate.”

But for conservatives in the United States, the shift is a vindication of their long-standing complaints that fact-checking initiatives and content moderation decisions are heavily skewed in favor of liberal views.

In a 2019 Pew poll, 70% of Republicans said they believed fact-checkers favored one side over the other, compared with 29% of Democrats and 47% of independents, respectively.

In his announcement, Zuckerberg himself echoed such concerns, saying that “fact-checkers were too politically biased and destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the United States.”

Taking a leaf out of Musk’s book, he said Meta will gradually introduce a “community feedback” system similar to the one used by X, where annotations are added to controversial posts based on user consensus.

Zuckerberg also gave credence to conservatives’ complaints about content moderation by pledging to remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are “far removed from mainstream discourse.”

“What started as a movement to be more inclusive has increasingly been used to close down opinions and exclude people with different ideas, and it has gone further than that,” he said.

Fact-checking organizations rejected accusations of liberal bias and stressed that platforms like Meta have always been the final arbiters of how to handle content deemed misinformation.

“The fact-checking press has never censored or removed posts; “It adds information and context to controversial claims, and contains deceptive content and conspiracy theories,” Angie Drobnik-Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, said in a LinkedIn post on Wednesday.

Lucas Graves, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who researches misinformation and disinformation, said arguments about the alleged bias of fact-checking initiatives were made in bad faith.

“In any healthy democratic discourse, you want people to give evidence publicly about what kind of statements and what kind of claims should be believed and what should not, and of course it is always up to you to make a judgment about whether to believe what you are hearing,” Greaves said. For Al Jazeera channel.

“We want journalists and fact-checkers to do their best to determine what is true and what is not true in political discourse that is often filled with information from all kinds of sources from across the political spectrum,” Greaves added.

There is research suggesting that fact-checkers, like journalists, lean disproportionately left in their politics, although it is difficult to determine how this might influence their decisions.

In a 2023 Harvard Kennedy School survey of 150 disinformation experts around the world, 126 identified as either “somewhat leftist,” “somewhat leftist,” or “very leftist.”

Meanwhile, various studies also suggest that right-leaning audiences are more susceptible to misinformation than their liberal peers.

Some critics of fact-checking groups, such as Silver, founder of the election forecasting site FiveThirtyEight, have argued that fact-checkers have often focused on outliers, or claims that cannot be proven one way or another, due to liberal leanings.

“Biden’s age scrutiny was one example of this,” Silver wrote on his subreddit on Thursday, referring to speculation about US President Joe Biden’s physical and cognitive health ahead of his decision to withdraw from the 2024 presidential race.

“Although a proper matter for journalistic investigation, allegations that the White House was covering up Biden’s shortcomings were often treated as ‘conspiracy’ theories, even though later reporting substantiated them.”

Wehbe, the Northeastern University professor, said that although fact-checking initiatives have limits in being able to resolve all disputes about the truth, they are an example of counter-speech that is critical to democratic and open societies.

“It is true that on many issues there is a conflict of values, not just facts, and it is difficult for fact-checkers to make a solid judgment about which side is right. But in almost any circumstance, good, accurate, informed journalism can add context and provide additional points.” Relevant about the issues being discussed.

“The ideal mode of expression in a democratic society is one in which opposing viewpoints collide and truth prevails.”

While studies have shown that fact-checking efforts can have a positive impact on combating misinformation, the impact appears modest, not least because of the sheer amount of information on the Internet.

A large 2023 study of about 33,000 participants in the United States found that warning labels and digital literacy education enhanced participants’ ability to correctly classify headlines as true or false – but only by 5% to 10%.

In many cases, fact-checking initiatives have failed to change minds in the same way that banning Trump from major social media platforms did not, said Donald Kimball, Tech Exchange editor at the Washington Policy Institute, affiliated with the conservative State Policy Network. His followers disappear.

“I think the ‘fact-checking’ principle of the new media economy is not killing him anymore,” Kimball told Al Jazeera.

“Maybe it was easy in the old media to eliminate any alternative narratives, but now people can see a group of individuals that they agree with. You no longer feel crazy about not agreeing to fact-check when you see other groups and communities disagreeing with it. I also believe that People are tired of being told that what they see clearly in front of them is wrong.

As for the future of fact-checking initiatives?

Wehbe said that the history of media is full of new forms of journalism that came and went in response to changing social, cultural and political conditions.

“Maybe the fact-checking movement will be reinvented in new ways, but the exact media format and branding will change — it may not even be called ‘fact-checking’ anymore,” he said.

“What I hope we don’t lose is the drive in journalism to pursue empirical facts as closely as humanly possible. That doesn’t mean some sort of arrogance and a sense that journalism has all the answers. But I think it’s the practical, empirical approach — the approach that says we’re open to changing our opinions — that looks for coherence.” Patterns the facts and accepts open debate, which is the appropriate position for professional journalism.