Indian fact-checking organisations that work with Meta Platforms, Inc. received a reprieve of a few months at least, as the Facebook and Instagram parent has decided to hold off on replacing them on its services.
In an interview with Bloomberg on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s Davos meeting, Meta’s head of global business Nicola Mendelsohn said that “for now,” fact-checking partnerships outside the U.S. will remain intact even as the firm shifts to “Community Notes” in its home country.
There is “nothing changing in the rest of the world at the moment; we are still working with those fact-checkers around the world,” Ms. Mendelsohn said. The statement comes as a constellation of fact-checking organisations in India worry about their future as Meta casts fact-checking firms as a censorship-enabling institution.
The shift has worried these firms as the partnership with Meta, which features their fact checks on posts featuring misinformation that has been flagged by the company’s systems, is a significant source of revenue to finance their operations.
A dozen fact-checking organisations who operate in India said in an open letter also signed by many global fact-checking partners earlier this month that Meta’s fact-checking programme “helped people have a positive experience on Facebook, Instagram and Threads by reducing the spread of false and misleading information in their feeds,” and that flagging “false information in order to slow its spread, without censoring, was the goal.”
The funding from these partnerships is substantial, enough that their withdrawal would have a destabilising impact on smaller organisations.
These partnerships were established in 2016, they said, with “strict nonpartisanship standards through verification by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN),” which continuously evaluates partnered firms’ independence.
One fact-checking editor who works with Meta said that the Facebook parent has not yet communicated what the future of these tie-ups will be. “We’re trying to figure out what the next steps will be and it will all depend on how and what Meta tells us,” the editor told The Hindu.
A six-month deal that Meta routinely signs with fact checkers is due to expire in the middle of this month around the world, and the firm has not indicated whether it will be extended or not. “If Meta decides to stop the program worldwide, it is almost certain to result in real-world harm in many places,” the joint statement from earlier this month said.
Community notes
The Community Notes feature was first premiered on X, formerly Twitter, and Mr. Zuckerberg has explicitly cited it as a model for Meta’s future fact checking in the U.S. The feature works by letting a select group of users add annotations on posts and letting other users rate whether these notes are useful or not.
As The Hindu reported last year, the Community Notes model — at least the way X has implemented it — has faced issues with fact-checking political misinformation, as the architecture of the system requires that users who usually disagree on other annotations must agree on any given note for it to appear; this system has, The Hindu found, prevented notes from appearing on multiple viral posts that featured false or misleading statements in the run up to the 2024 Lok Sabha election.
Jay Baxter, a machine learning engineer at X, defended this architecture in an interview with Asterix magazine last November, saying that the system “results in very accurate notes because, when you do have political polarisation among people who’ve disagreed substantially, they really tend to only agree that notes are helpful when the notes are also very accurate.” For posts that suffer from political polarisation, he argued, “You could argue that maybe there should be a note in those cases, but maybe these aren’t cases where it’s possible to change people’s minds with that note.”
Published - January 21, 2025 10:13 pm IST
