No more fact checking for Meta. How will this change the media – and the search for the truth?

“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts,” the late New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan memorably wrote four decades ago.

It seems like a simpler time – especially when you consider the Meta’s decision to end a fact-checking program on social media apps Facebook, Instagram and Threads, and what the consequences might be for an industry built to bring clarity and seek the truth itself.

Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement this week was widely seen in news verification circles as a nod to President-elect Donald Trump, whose first term popularized the phrase. “alternative facts.”

Meta replaces his fact check with one “community notes” system reminiscent of X, where it is up to users to correct misinformation on its platforms. In a way, it hearkens back to “he said-she said” journalism, or the view of some political debate moderators that it should be the opponents’ role, not the journalists’, to point out lies. It also suggests something else: the notion that the loudest voices and the best told stories can win the day.

The moment is a crossroads for the fact-checking industry, which will see its influence sharply curtailed when Trump takes office for his second term.

“In the short term, this is bad news for people who want to go to social media to find reliable and accurate information,” said Angie Drobnic Holan, director of the International Fact-Checking Network. Her organization started in 2015 with about 50 members and now has 170, some of whom are facing staff cuts and potential closure due to Meta’s move.

“In the long term,” she said, “I think it’s very uncertain what this will all mean.”

Fact checking in the media is a few decades old

Fact-checking is a strange business, especially when you consider that it is a function of all journalism. The concept bubbled up about three decades ago in part to counter “he said-she said” stories and monitor claims in political ads. The organization FactCheck.org, whose primary purpose was to help journalists, started in 2003, and the more public-oriented PolitiFact four years later.

PolitiFact, started by then-Tampa Bay Times Washington bureau chief Bill Adair in 2007, won a Pulitzer Prize for its 2008 campaign coverage. It encouraged politicians to bend or break the truth in ways that were often difficult for journalists protective of the sources whose voices populated their stories.

In 2012, fact-checkers were under attack, primarily by Republicans who were convinced many were biased and were examining voting records to try to prove the point, said Adair, now a professor at Duke University. Trump, he said, “accelerated a trend that had already begun.”

Some conservative suspicion of fact-checkers has been justified because of mistakes that have been made, although there were some Republicans who told lies and just didn’t like being called out on it, said Steve Hayes, executive director and editor of the Center -right. website The Dispatch.

“The people who practice fact-checking are, in some ways, saying, ‘We are the arbiter of truth, period,'” Hayes said. “And every time you do this, it invites scrutiny of the work you’re doing.”

Labeling systems largely didn’t help either. Labeling a misstatement “pants on fire,” as some fact-checkers have, can be a catchy way to attract attention, but also fuel outrage.

Holan opposes the view that fact-checkers have been biased in their work: “This line of attack comes from those who feel they should be able to exaggerate and lie without contradiction or contradiction.”

People believe that truth remains elusive even with fact-checking

GOP suspicion still quickly took root. Journalism’s Poynter Institute found in a 2019 survey that 70% of Republicans believed the work of fact-checkers was one-sided. About the same percentage of Democrats thought they were fair. Poynter hasn’t asked the same question since. Last year, however, Poynter found that 52% of Americans say they generally have trouble deciding whether what they read about elections is true or not.

In a column Wednesday on the conservative watchdog site NewsBusters.org, Tim Graham wrote that during the first nine months of 2024, PolitiFact criticized Republican officials for providing “mostly false” facts 88 times, compared to 31 times for Democrats. To Graham, this proves that the idea that the site is independent or non-partisan is ridiculous.

But is it bias? Or is it fact checking?

Adair used to be reluctant to say what is now the title of his new book: “Beyond the Big Lie: The Epidemic of Political Lying, Why Republicans Do it More, and How it Could Burn Down Our Democracy.” He no longer hesitates.

“Trump is unmatched as a liar in American politics,” Adair said. “I’m not the first to say that. I think he’s taken advantage of the fact that there’s been this pushback on fact-checkers and shown other politicians that you can get away with lying, so go ahead and do it.”

The tension over fact-checking played out during the last presidential campaign, when Trump’s team was furious with ABC News for calling attention to false statements made by the former president during his only debate with Democrat Kamala Harris.

Trump’s second victory has changed the equation at Meta. X has already curtailed its independent fact-checking under owner Elon Musk, a Trump ally. The moves are important because they remove fact-checking from places where many users wouldn’t otherwise be exposed to it.

By itself, fact-checking “doesn’t reach those who are vulnerable to misinformation,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the University of Pennsylvania, who started FactCheck.org. “It tends to reach audiences that were already knowledgeable and cautious.”

On social media, fact-checking also became part of the algorithms that drove information to people, or away from them. Material marked as fake would often be downgraded so that it received less exposure. For Republicans who have criticized Big Tech, that amounted to censorship. But for Jamieson, successful fact-checking isn’t censorship — “it’s the process of arguing.”

Jamieson expressed some optimism that other savvy social media users will step up to prevent the dangerous spread of falsehoods. But for fact-checking as it is today to continue to thrive and even exist as a journalistic endeavor, Adair said it will likely take influential Republican figures to publicly stand up for the importance of truth.

NewsBuster columnist Graham had more pointed advice in an interview. “My remedy in all arguments about media trust,” he said, “is that humility is required.”

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David Bauder writes about media for AP. Follow him at and