The Fall of the Fact Checkers

Will Misinformation Triumph At Last?

Chris Britt, January 7, 2025

First Elon Musk showed Twitter’s fact checkers the door. Now, eight years after hiring independent fact checking organizations to clear out misinformation, Mark Zuckerberg has decided to make Meta a fact checker-free zone. According to Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan, Meta discovered that:

Experts, like everyone else, have their own biases and perspectives. This showed up in the choices some made about what to fact check and how. Over time we ended up with too much content being fact checked that people would understand to be legitimate political speech and debate. Our system then attached real consequences in the form of intrusive labels and reduced distribution. A program intended to inform too often became a tool to censor.

We are now changing this approach.

Kaplan specifically noted that Meta was loosening restrictions on controversial topics like gender, gender identity, and immigration. More specifically, users can now post “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality” and claim that “Immigrants are grubby, filthy pieces of shit.”

This has launched a tidal wave of outrage across the left-leaning sections of the Internet. The people who have been shouting for years that the fascists were planning to LITERALLY KILL queers and brown people have decided that this is the moment they put their evil schemes into action.

If you get your news from mainstream media, you may be convinced that Zuckerberg and Musk are joining forces with Trump to build a new White Supremacist Christofascist Zionist Multibillionaire Oligarchy. The New York Times warns us “Meta Says Fact-Checkers Were the Problem. Fact-Checkers Rule That False.” But while many are predicting an apocalyptic slide into chaos, despair, and disinformation, others are cheering their newfound freedom.

Will the decline of fact-checkers turn social media into a sewer of toxic sludge or will it spark a renaissance in political discourse? Is free speech a tool to overthrow tyrants or a gateway to tyranny? As with most controversies, most are treating this complicated issue as a simple yes/no question. Let’s dig a little deeper.

On May 4, 2009, real estate tycoon and reality TV star Donald Trump Tweeted about his upcoming appearance on David Letterman. From that opening to his January 8, 2021 suspension, Trump sent over 57,000 messages. A 2024 study found that Twitter actually lowered the Republican vote share in 2016 and 2020. But many believed, and still believe, that Trump’s Twitter presence played a key role in his 2016 victory.

He certainly wasn’t helped by the mainstream media which, with the exception of Fox News, was overwhelmingly opposed to Trump and supportive of Hillary Clinton. This struck fear in the hearts of many journalists and political pundits. If voters now trusted social media cranks more than respectable news sources, what did that mean for the future of journalism — and for the United States?

As Darrell M. West of the Brookings Institution explained in December 2017:

New digital platforms have unleashed innovative journalistic practices that enable novel forms of communication and greater global reach than at any point in human history. But on the other hand, disinformation and hoaxes that are popularly referred to as “fake news” are accelerating and affecting the way individuals interpret daily developments. Driven by foreign actors, citizen journalism, and the proliferation of talk radio and cable news, many information systems have become more polarized and contentious, and there has been a precipitous decline in public trust in traditional journalism.

Social media played a key role in the 2011-2014 Arab Spring uprisings and in Ukraine’s 2014 Euromaidan protests. The CIA and foreign services were well aware of how sites like Twitter and Facebook could be weaponized. They also knew that Trump had managed to gain widespread social media support despite a largely hostile press. And so a Democratic Party in shock pointed a trembling finger at Russia.

Was “Russiagate” a plot devised to discredit the incoming President, or did the Russians engage in shady dealings to put their preferred candidate in the White House? Once again, it’s not an either/or situation. Given America’s history of pulling strings in foreign elections, there’s no reason to suppose that other countries don’t engage in similar shenanigans. But it’s also clear that the Democratic Party spent four years claiming that Trump stole the election with Vladimir Putin’s help.

Five of the six companies that own 90% of America’s media outlets were equally dismayed by the 2016 election results. They spoke at length of the dangers of “disinformation” and “misinformation” and worried about how innocent Americans were being duped by conspiracy theories. (The sixth company, News Corp, found its Trump-friendly Fox News stories targeted regularly as disinformation).

To be fair, there was and is lots of questionable material to be found on the Internet. Many writers are long on rhetoric and short on facts, and quite a few create clickbait out of whole cloth. And asking the public to choose their favorite news sources is like asking 6-year-olds to plan their own meals. Jojo From Jerz has over 59,000 subscribers; Jeff Tiedrich has over 153,000; Heather Cox Richardson has over 1.9 million. Given their druthers, many will choose Sludgestack over challenging content.

To protect their users from disinformation — and to avoid problems with an increasingly aggressive government — social media companies began hiring “fact checkers.” Politifact, FactCheck.org, and Snopes are just a few of the many organizations that help separate the facts from the fiction. And to protect vulnerable minorities, many media outlets have enlisted the aid of the Anti-Defamation League, GLAAD, and other activist groups.

All this has made a few 501(c)(3) groups and NGOs richer. But has it done anything to improve the quality of online discourse or to increase trust in the media?

Courtesy of Gallup Polls

Fact-checking reached its zenith in 2020, as government agencies worked overtime to combat “COVID misinformation.” People had their accounts, licenses, and bank accounts pulled for talking about Ivermectin or suggesting the COVID vaccinations might have serious side effects. These actions were widely cheered by those who Trusted the Science and hated the COVIDiots who didn’t.

Dr. Peter Hotez, one of the loudest vaccine advocates, justified this in an interview for AMA Update:

200,000 Americans needlessly perished because they refused the COVID vaccine, so that this anti-science—and they were victims, basically, of this kind of anti-science aggression. So this anti-science movement is a dangerous political force.

But we don't frame it in that context. Too often, we toss it off as something called misinformation or infodemic, as though it's just some random junk on the internet, when in fact, it's organized, it's well-financed, and it's politically motivated.

Now, it's a killing force. And that's why we need to care about it—because if we're health care providers or biomedical scientists, you know, it used to be enough just to want to save lives. And now—an added burden is now trying to figure out a way to combat the anti-vaccine, anti-science aggression, because it becomes such a killing force.

But while many Science-Trusters declared their contempt for those who relied on Fake News, it’s only a small step from zenith to nadir. COVID skeptics could be banned but COVID skepticism grew as the lockdowns went on, and only increased after they ended.

In 2020 comments talking about Wuhan lab leaks were censored on Facebook and other social media sites. Today the CIA has determined that COVID was likely released by a Wuhan lab leak. It’s become clear that the COVID vaccines, like other vaccines, has occasional serious and even fatal side effects. It’s become increasingly clear that much “COVID misinformation” was at least partially correct.

The Hunter Biden laptop drove yet another nail in the fact checker coffin. When the conservative-leaning New York Post broke the story weeks before the 2020 election, 51 former intelligence officials declared that it “had all the classic earmarks of Russian disinformation.” The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence later found that those officials had colluded with the Biden administration to quash the story.

A 2022 Australian study found that fact-checking stories decreased reader trust across party lines. By declaring a story true you remind readers that it may be false, and vice versa. Every time you say “debunk” your audience hears “bunk.” Fact-checking convinces nobody save those were already convinced. People who are emotionally invested in their stances are rarely moved by appeals to logic and reason.

By 2024 just 31% of Americans had a great deal or a fair amount of trust in mainstream media. When you break down the numbers by party lines, you find that while 54% of Democrats trust the media, just 27% of independents and only 12% of Republicans have a great deal or fair amount of trust in news reports. And young people distrust the media more than their elders.

Almost everybody agrees that “fake news” is a problem. They just disagree on which news is fake. And while everybody makes nice noises about free speech, most have as much love for their opposition as the world has for insurance CEOs. Few Fox news watchers would complain if CNN’s staff were sent to jail or sued into bankruptcy, and vice versa. And all this confusion can be laid at the feet of a modern existential crisis.

Jean-Paul Sartre

To be sure, the one who practices bad faith is hiding a displeasing truth or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth. Bad faith then has in appearance the structure of falsehood. Only what changes everything is the fact that in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. Thus the duality of the deceiver and the deceived does not exist here.

Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (Hazel E. Barnes, Translator). p. 49.

For most of history we knew exactly who we were. We were members of a family, members of a tribe, members of a faith, members of a people. Today our culture focuses on the individual and we are tasked with creating ourselves. And one of the most popular ways to present ourselves today is through our politics.

We commonly refer to ostentatious displays of right-thinking as “virtue signals.” We might better call them identity signals. Tribes of ancestry have been replaced by political tribes, but they are no less tribal for all that. You don’t get into the tribe because of your ancestry. You join it by believing the right things.

The Left tribe despises the Right tribe for nationalism and racism. The Right tribe sees the Left tribe as sexually degenerate child-raping America-hating communists. But they never figure out that in doing so, they are creating their own exclusionary groups with its own in-group preferences and out-group prejudices.

Team Left will loudly denounce their country like Christian converts burning their family idols. Team Right will just as loudly proclaim its greatness and promise to defend it against all who would harm. The more they argue, the more they become each other’s Jungian Shadow. They are no longer opponents or even enemies so much as each other’s emotional dumping grounds.

When you’re locked in this spiral, it’s almost impossible to cede a point and change your mind. To disagree is to betray your tribe; to betray your tribe is to betray yourself. It’s much easier to insult the querent rather than addressing inconvenient facts, or to pretend the statement is propaganda posted by a bot or a paid liar. This self-deception is what Jean-Paul Sartre called mauvaise foi (“bad faith”).

To live in bad faith is to be an actor confusing your role for yourself. When you reduce yourself to slogans and signs, you’ve become something created by someone else. You’ve replaced reality with a stage upon which you shout your lines and play your part in a great theatrical performance. And, like most performances, it entertains without actually accomplishing anything of substance.

So long as you read the news through a tribalist lens, you will find yourself responding in union with your tribe. But unlike classical tribes forged over dozens of generations, your new tribe has trends, not traditions. You will find no roots from which to ground yourself, only an ever-shifting matrix of taboos and demands.

If you honestly care about facts, you need to start doing your own research. That may require Google Translating foreign news sources. It may mean reading materials from people whose politics you find misguided or even odious. It may even involve rejecting ideas that your peer group considers written in stone. But in the end you will have a better idea of the world as it is rather than as how you are supposed to see it.