Joel Kaplan, Zuckerberg’s second in command at Meta, has recently said that community notes will launch “elsewhere” in 2026, including the EU.
This is the first time Meta all but acknowledges they will be ending their collaboration with fact-checkers in the near future around the world, after Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of “getting rid” of fact-checkers in the US and his accusations of censorship, which had a devastating first effect: massive harassment to fact-checkers worldwide.
But, what happens if you “get rid” of fact-checkers?
Let’s go to the immediate repercussions in the European Union, also because Kaplan “emphasized that the company would work with European regulators whenever it decides to bring those changes to the EU.”
In the first half of 2024, 31 million posts were tagged with fact-checking articles across the continent as being false on Meta’s platforms. With 189,000 fact-checking articles, the program enabled fact-checkers’ work to reach 31 million posts. This is, millions of users that may have come across that content and were alerted that it was false. Because that is what the program does: fact-checkers flag content as false and write an explanatory article, and then Meta tags such content and alerts users of its lack of credibility.
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The third party fact-checking programme gives us scalability: we can reach more people to give them reliable information, and then, citizens can make informed decisions, like not sharing false content and thus, limiting the spread of disinformation. In countries like Hungary, with only one fact-checker, 679,000 pieces of content were tagged and it reduced the shares by 46%. In others with more fact-checkers like Spain, 4,7 million pieces of content were tagged, reducing its shares by 50% (see data by country here). With fact-checking embedded into the system, verified information reached massive audiences that would otherwise have been left to be deceived. All without infringing at all on the users free speech: anyone could ignore the label and read, share, or comment on a piece of disinformation if that’s what they wanted to do.
Scalability is by far the biggest problem, but not the only one. Within the program, fact-checking organisations have access to monitoring tools that enable their newsrooms to better track and discover disinformation content across the platforms. If access to those tools were to disappear, the investigation of the Doppelganger campaign in Germany, that unveiled how Russia has been spreading its propaganda using cloned websites of Western media outlets, may not have been possible. Or how the editor of Sputnik surpassed the EU ban in Czechia by creating fake accounts across platforms to distribute a manipulated video of President Zelensky. The same goes for revealing coordinated crossborder disinformation campaigns during crisis situations like the one lived in Spain during the Valencia floods last year.
The program also funds the work of fact-checkers across the continent beyond the work they do for Meta. We estimate that around 20 million euros will stop entering into the counter disinformation ecosystem. For organisations like mine, that is roughly 20% of our income: we can continue doing our work. But in countries like Czechia, Slovenia or Albania, this might be the end for entities that serve national citizens in providing context and verified data to make up their minds on all sorts of topics. In most others, organisations will have to downsize and the EFCSN estimates that in Europe, at least 12 will cease operations according to an internal survey; many more in the rest of the world.
It is important to note that such funding is, in most cases, not dedicated only to the program, but it enables fact-checkers to do all the other work. We’re talking about fact-checking political discourse; conduct media literacy training; fight disinformation in other platforms that don’t have similar programs; aggregate data that can afterwards be used by researchers and institutions to better address their solutions; or conduct investigations.
Disinformation everywhere, not just on Meta
If fact-checkers were to cease operations, this has repercussions across the digital ecosystem, not only within Meta. For a decade fact-checkers have been providing free information to tech companies through ClaimReview, a tagging system used to identify our work for search engines and social media platforms such as Google, Bing, Facebook and Youtube. The platforms then use the tags to promote and highlight fact-checked articles across their services: it is a way for them to prioritize fact based information. It is a way of moderating content: you show fact-checked information first in your search engine, and then, the algorithmic results. The use of ClaimReview enabled Google and Bing to expose fact-checked content to over 125 million EU citizens in the first half of 2024 (see data by country here). We contribute to Claimreview because we believe it has a good social impact in helping protect the public. We may not be able to do it any longer if platforms decide to cease collaboration with fact-checkers.
EU’s political strategy against disinfo at stake
Furthermore, the work of fact-checkers is embedded in the EU’s political strategy in the fight against disinformation and its Democracy Shield. In Europe, fact-checking organisations play a fundamental role in EDMO and its regional hubs, towards which the EU has invested over 30 million euros in the past years and around which fact-checkers contribute data to researchers across the continent as well as participate in the institutional ecosystem of the fight against disinformation. Without fact-checkers, EDMO and other counterdisinformation strategies have little to do because we are the ones at the forefront of the problem, collecting the data, tracking the actors and feeding that information to the rest of the system. The same goes to EEAS strategy beyond EU borders, in their collaboration with fact-checkers in the Western Balkans, Georgia, Ukraine, or the Global South.
Community Notes performance: not enough
At this point, it might be worth talking about the effectiveness of community notes. Fundación Maldita.es conducted a research piece on Platform response to disinformation during the past European election. What we saw after analyzing 1,321 social media posts spreading disinformation across the continent is that platforms that don’t have any kind of partnership with fact-checkers, like Youtube, took no visible action regarding 75% of disinformation content. Some of those videos reached 500.000 views. How did community notes on X perform? Not well.
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X took no visible action in 70% of the cases and Community Notes were visible in only 15% of the posts already debunked by European fact-checkers. Among the 20 most viral debunked posts that received no action by the platforms, 18 were hosted in X with over 1,5 million views each. Another piece of evidence on community notes lack of effectiveness: Over 90% of the hoaxes about the 2024 deadly Spanish flash floods on X debunked by Maldita.es didn’t have Community Notes, but it is not always because they do not exist, also because the algorithm does not consider there is enough consensus among users of different tendencies to show them. This focus on consensus, rather than factuality, ends up in disinformation about the most polarized and salient issues rarely getting a visible community note.
Community notes, as conceived by X, are not enough.
- Notes with quality sources and expert knowledge need to be favored over “consensus” among users who usually disagree;
- Notes need to appear faster in the most dangerous and viral misinformation.
- Furthermore, Community notes is a system often weaponized by organized groups and users with multiple accounts.
- An independent monitoring system is needed: both in regards of content and how it operates.
- Lastly, on this topic, what we often see is how fact-checkers content is used in community notes. Over the past year, X users have proposed more than 850 Community Notes citing only my organization’s articles as evidence. If we get rid of fact-checkers, that affects community notes as well.
The risks of fact-checking disappearing in certain regions
The first steps the Trump administration has taken are also affecting the fact-checking ecosystem worldwide. With lack of a strong philanthropic effort towards journalism and little EU funding, many organisations have relied on USAid and platform funding for subsistence. Trump’s executive order to suspend all foreign aid is already having devastating consequences across our industry: in European countries organisations will have to downsize or close in the coming months; in places like Venezuela, fact-checking organisations are firing their employees as we speak.
In places where fact-checking saves lives, like Libya, Sudan or Ethiopia, this is a death sentence. It is also bad news for EU Diplomacy in many countries in which foreign interference from Russia and China is a growing concern, if the few organisations that were tracking it and revealing it disappear.
EU’s Code of Practice: how did we get here
It seems that we’re always at a tipping point regarding the fight against disinformation. But in this case, I think we’ve gone beyond that point. In 2018 I was part of the European Commission High-Level Group on Fake News and online disinformation and what platforms told us then is that they were not responsible for the content users shared on their services, but they were willing to cooperate in fighting online disinformation affecting them. We trusted them and have been working in a Code of Practice against disinformation for years now, that contemplates collaboration with fact-checkers as a key risk mitigation effort.
And now, they’re disengaging. Seven years later, what we see is how day after day Elon Musk tweets that X is the media; Zuckerberg blames legacy media and the EU for the institutionalization of censorship; and YouTube, Google, and Linkedin have unsubscribed their commitments towards the fight against disinformation in the Code of Practice in relation to fact-checking. Let me note here that Meta has still signed such commitments but making clear that it might decide to follow the same path it has in the US. TikTok has signed as well but with a huge caveat: it will only remain committed to fact-checking if their competitors do it as well.
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It is time to put pressure on them. The EU cannot step down from its responsibility to protect European citizens. It’s given itself a set of rules, laws and mechanisms, and they should be applied.
As you can see, if we “get rid” of fact-checkers, this entails major repercussions to all of us. Fact-checking is not censorship, far from that, fact-checking adds speech to public debates, it provides context and facts for every citizen to make up their own mind. We are a fundamental piece in the defense of free choice, specially in elections; we fight manipulation and foreign interference; and we are a key element in the counter disinformation strategy.
And don’t get me wrong, countering disinformation is one of the most critical tasks democracies have right now.
Manipulated citizens do not make free choices at the voting booth and manipulated elections are not free and fair elections.
* Clara Jiménez Cruz is the co-founder and CEO of Fundación Maldita.es and Chair of the European Fact-Checking Standards Network (EFCSN). You may read her original article here.
