Meta's plan to wind down its US fact-checking efforts placed the company's program in the crosshairs not only of professional uncertainty but also the wildfire conspiracy theories flooding online channels. Just Tuesday, while Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, announced the decision, wildfires swept across parts of Los Angeles, fueled more by destruction and a rush of misinformation.
"It's like calling the fire department when the house is already on fire," said Alan Duke, a co-founder of fact-checking site Lead Stories and former CNN journalist. "Meanwhile, misinformation spreads on social media like the flames that engulfed homes." False narratives flooded Instagram and Threads of looting claims to doctored footage of the Hollywood sign ablaze. And fact-checkers scrambled to reduce the spread of those falsehoods by attaching labels and warning users. Meta's fact-checking program, launched after controversies over misinformation around Donald Trump's presidential election in 2016, has paid professional organizations such as Lead Stories and PolitiFact to investigate online claims. With Meta having decided to end the program by March 2025, these partners face financial uncertainty with some likely to shut down. Duke and his team continued working, but it still was unknown how the following crises would be addressed without the support of Meta.
The wildfires also fueled political and partisan misinformation once again, with the likes of President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk spewing dubious claims. Trump used his Truth Social to blame Democrats for the fires, while Musk downplayed climate change's role, instead attributing the disaster to diversity and inclusion policies. Musk even supported conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who framed the fires as part of a globalist plot.
These are some stories which recreate what has happened and happened before such as in Maui wildfires 2023. Theories of conspiracies came in, blaming weather manipulation led by the government for such fires. In return, they defame agencies involved in responding to emergencies who have a rough time handling their crises when being attacked from different angles.
Meta will replace a professional fact-checking system with something like X (formerly Twitter's) Community Notes, where users can append contextual notes to posts—but only when contributors with varying viewpoints agree upon the accuracy. Though successful in terms of its ability to tag misinformation, Community Notes is also criticized as not having either the ethical stringency or the expert level of professionals in fact-checking.
Although the Community Notes have already fact-checked such a post as government weather manipulation posted by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, other baseless theories, such as Alex Jones' globalist plot theory, and many more, go unchecked and hence collect millions of views against public trust while boosting those conspiracy narratives.
Community-based models also have their own shortcomings, she said. Professional fact-checkers, Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network, noted, are better for dealing with complicated and subtle forms of misinformation; crowdsourced models tend to focus on obvious misattributions.
Professional fact-checking hangs in the balance as Meta pivots. This will actually fit in well with the wider industry trend towards decentralizing content moderation, which could leave platforms and their users all the more susceptible to the viral spread of falsehoods at critical moments.
