We Are the Fact-Checkers
And we have our work cut out for us
With this week’s announcement by Mark Zuckerberg that Meta is abandoning independent fact-checking in favor of community notes, I feel that now is a good time for me to get back into regularly writing this newsletter. I have also had time to process Trump’s unfortunate election to a second term as President, the anger and frustration have subsided, and what has settled in is a sense of urgency. Not an urgency to resist Trump and his MAGA ilk. Rather an urgency to combat the incoming deluge of misinformation (from now on I will be calling them, when appropriate, lies) that we are about to experience.
When Elon Musk purchased Twitter back in 2022, I am not sure many of us really knew how bad it was going to get. We knew he was going to be an irresponsible administrator of such a platform. We saw it from the beginning, when he walked through the doors of Twitter headquarters carrying a sink as though he were the funniest man alive. We saw the downward spiral of the platform quickly, though, as content moderation was relaxed, accounts that had violated the original terms of service and were shut down were reinstated, leading to the spread of bullying, lies, and misinformation and the abandoning of independent fact-checking in favor of a community notes feature that is now being replicated by Meta’s products. Whereas true content moderation stops the spread of lies, community notes do nothing more than flag the information as questionable, much as the Surgeon General’s warning on a box of cigarettes flags the product as dangerous.
But the lies continue to spread. In fact, a warning actually emboldens the spreaders and originators of this false information to keep spreading it because they can claim that there would not be resistance to it if it were true. At least with taking the content down, it creates challenges to finding the lie in the first place. In the internet age, this is a feature, not a bug, since most internet searchers stop at whatever they see nearest the top of the page and are not willing to put in a whole lot of effort on their own. I am thinking of those people who claim to have done their own research, which amounts to watching a couple of hours of YouTube videos made by a 50-year-old man still living in his parents’ basement.
As far as information is concerned, it will not be long before Facebook goes the way of Twitter. Currently, lies can be squashed, albeit in a very flawed way. Take away that independent fact check, and the lies will spread with nothing more than a warning of its potential falsehood.
Community notes, being notes written by members of the community, automatically lend themselves to not being taken seriously. And there is nothing to stop a coordinated troll campaign from influencing the notes resulting in truth being flagged as questionable.
Social Media and Information
At this point, it should be a given that social media is a terrible place to get information. And yet, according to recent polling, somewhere between 50%-60% of adults get their news from social media. This probably would not be a problem if they were getting this information from vetted and trusted news sources. But that is not necessarily the case.
What happens in the social media landscape is that, even if a story comes from the likes of The Atlantic, Axios, or even FOXNews, it is going to be taken with a grain of salt compared to some take on the same story from someone who has a larger following than those outlets because higher follower counts → more engagement → more shares → more revenue. Trust in legacy media is eroding daily. Some of this is their own fault due to capitulating to potential authoritarians rather than calling them out, leading to seasoned journalists leaving in droves. But we cannot ignore the fact that Donald Trump and his extremely dedicated following have sown distrust in legacy media for nearly a decade now. They have elevated their own chosen media outlets, such as One America News or The Daily Wire. The result has been an overall distrust of legacy media, and in fact almost all news media and created a dangerous environment for journalism as a whole.
It is not just people on the right who are coming to distrust the news. The same is happening on the political left. Once go-to sources such as The Washington Post and The New York Times are being dropped by subscribers en masse. And people on the left are touting their own biased sources such as Vox or RawStory. The distrust in legacy media has led to a splintering of consumers into further polarized groups.
At one time, we consumed information together. There was a time, not too terribly long ago in fact, when the news we consumed, even though it was on a different station, was on every TV at the same time every night. And the stories we heard were likely very similar. Or at least about the same general set of events. So, when we went to work the next day and were talking about world events around the water cooler, it would be about the same things.
This is not the case anymore. By getting our news from differently biased sources, we are likely not even hearing the same stories. OAN might be talking about what Israel is doing to combat Hamas in Gaza and Mother Jones might be talking about the impact tariffs may have on the cost of steel. And when we get to the water cooler the next day, assuming you are one of those who has gone back to the office, there is nothing to talk about. Your conservative coworker may not even be fully aware of what a tariff is, and you might not have even heard Israel’s side of the story in their mission against Hamas.
This makes truth-telling and defending that much more important. As believers and defenders of truth, we now have an even greater responsibility to defend said truth. And a greater responsibility to confront the lies that we are going to start seeing in greater abundance on three more of our favorite social media platforms. When that meme crosses your feed claiming that Donald Trump ended violence in Gaza immediately after being elected, it is our responsibility to call this out for the lie that it is because there is not going to be someone there to do it for us.
But we also have the responsibility to make sure we are spreading the most truthful information possible. Refuse to share a story based solely on the headlines, which are often designed to generate engagement and may or may not be telling the complete story. Read the story. Take the time to actually know what you are sharing before you share it. And take the time to call out lies wherever they are.
We are the fact checkers now, as we should have been all along.