Mark Zuckerberg lit a fuse, walked away, and detonated the world of media from a safe distance. Meta changed the fact-checking game. You’ve read all the takes. Well, nearly all.
To understand the current state of fact checking, let’s start with something easy. What color is this square? Take a second. There’s going to be a test.
You ready? Great. If you said, “Black.” You’re not wrong. But you’re not right. There’s a small off-black logo in the middle. And, if you accepted that this is a square, well, that’s wrong too. It’s actually a rectangle.
In this stupidly simple example, you see the problem. It’s generally a black square. But it’s not actually, factually fully black or a square. Fact checking in real life is hard because very few things in life are black (Hex #000000) or white (#FFFFFF). They’re not even a shade of gray. They’re gradients of complexity. This isn’t a new problem. In 1951, the English mathematician Fry Lewis Richardson tried to measure the coastline of Great Britian. If you measure it using very small segments you get one answer. If you measure it using longer segments you get a different answer. The Coastline Pardox. I took enough math to know this feels like a Riemann’s Sum thingy. Enough that I can spell it without googling it. Hand to God.
Who measures facts and how do they measure facts matter. Let’s with the who.
USA Today is one of Meta fact checking partners. Who among us hasn’t been on a business trip, stayed at a Holiday Inn and got smarter reading McNews? In fact, if I had nickel every time I said, “Wow, no one delivers credible news like USA Today,” I couldn’t get five pennies at the Change Bank.”
Gannett owns USA Today. In Fall 2023, the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Pennsylvania and Rutgers School of Communications and Information published a joint paper about integrity issues at Gannett stemming from the company’s financial problems. The only place the word integrity shows up in the click-baity (for an academic paper) report is in the preamble. The story was about pay gaps, equality, and the loss of local journalism. So much for trusting major academic centers with important sounding names.
Still, money is money and Gannett, who filed for Chapter 11 protection in 2020, needs all the money it can get. The Columbia Journalism Review blasted Gannett for printing newspapers that are just filled with misinformation targeting Democrats at the company’s Des Moines plant. Carol Hunter, the executive editor at Gannett’s Des Moines Register said, “These are commercial print clients. We do not discuss our commercial print clients and have no further comment.” Gannett will take money for printing lies but I’m sure they do a better job checking facts for Meta.
Unless… unless those stories are generated by an AI. Then, Gannett is out of its depth. Gannett used AI to write stories that were “laughably bad and full of obvious errors.” Oh, and they attached the stories to writer bylines they made up.
Gannett is big. Some of the of the outlets who fact check for Meta are much smaller. Check Your Fact is one of them. Ten people work in its newsroom. Per his LinkedIn, Jesse Stiller has been the Managing Editor since August 2022. From February 2020 to November 2022, he was a data entry operator at AP. In between, he spent four months pitching stories on baseball prospects as a freelancer. I’m sure you feel confident that many of the billions of stories coursing threw Meta’s vanes are getting some big-time scrutiny. If there’s a copyeditor out there, that last line is a glaring example of the things that pass for righting these days.
Reasonably, Jesse is worried about what happens to Check Your Facts when Meta pulls the plug. What Wired didn’t mentioned — even in passing — is that Daily Caller owns Check Your Fact. Yeah, that Daily Caller. I’m going to point out the hypocrisy wrapped in an enigma with this story about the litany of factual problems at the Daily Caller from… drumroll… the Guardian.
Ok, if the too-big are financially bankrupt and the too-small are morally bankrupt, let’s Goldilocks this thing.
Meta’s decision is “a backwards step that risks a chilling effect around the world.” That quote comes from Chris Morris, the CEO of Meta fact-check partner, Full Fact. For four years from 2017 to 2021, he was a senior correspondent of data and analysis at the BBC in charge of… get this… fact checking. Now for those of you who don’t follow UK politics closely, that’s bad. Here’s the opening line from a Telegraph story from last November, “In a culture saturated with misinformation and fake news there would, on the face of it, appear little to argue against the creation of a dedicated BBC fact-checking unit.” In short, don’t rely on the BBC for facts. The problems at the ‘Beeb date back to at least 2020 when — you guessed it — Morris was a lead fact checker. That’s per the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford. But, I’m sure a guy who got BBC into this mess and his team are doing a bang-up job for Meta.
Meta paid Full Fact about $500,000 last year. Google paid the company about $650,000. They also get money from donations. How can a company scour Meta for fakes and eke out an existence on that amount of revenue?Well, you pay people very little and you use AI tools.
They have an active job posting for a Government Tracker. The position pays $33k to $48k. The candidate will use Full Fact’s AI tools to see where the government deliverables deviate from its promises. Ideally, they’re looking for journalists or people with research experience. “Prior fact checking experience isn’t necessary.”
Cheap staff and tools handle the costs. How do fact checking companies make money? Meta pays based on the number of fact-checks fact-checkers check. Woodchucks and seashells come to mind. So, it’s an arbitrage. Find more stuff, get more of the $100M Meta paid to fact checkers since 2016.
Which begs the question, “Why?” Given that a few dozen lowly paid people employed by organizations with questionable ethics or efficacy are our last line of defense of —what was it again? Oh, yeah — “a backwards step that risks a chilling effect around the world,” WHY does Meta outsource this?
Is it because the new old guy who’s going to re-occupy the 16-bedroom, 55-bathroom, 55,000-square foot #000000 house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue worth $350M likes different information, pals around with Elon Musk, and chastised Zuck at a recent pow-wow at this beachfront resort?
Yeah, there’s some of that. It never hurts to suck up to the folks in power. But there’s something even bigger going on here — I think.
You’ve read complaints from the people who stand to lose money — Chris, Jesse, Gannett. Of course. And, you’re going to read admonishments from publishers who think something has been lost. And… none of it matters. It’s all a smoke screen.
The fact checkers don’t remove content, accounts, or pages on Meta’s platforms. When they flag content, Meta throttles it. Only Meta removes content. And, then, only when it violates their terms of services.
It’s not about the who or the how or even the why? It’s about the what. What the f*ct is this all about?
This.
Meta is not a publisher. They’re basically a new-age phone company. We just use their wires to correspond. Unlike a publisher, they’re not liable for what they say. Because they (technically) don’t say anything. We do. But, they’re starting to do things that could cause them to lose that section 230 status. Saying their own things.
How’s that for a paradox? More to come.
