For fact checkers, using Meta’s platforms is drudgery.

It is unglamorous, it deals with a large volume of human or AI-abetted bullshit and, despite the need for it, few can really appreciate the effort it takes to set things straight.

While most people can easily use Facebook, Messenger, or Instagram to share memes and photos, tell stories, and occasionally gossip about life without a care, bad actors use it to foster hatred and distrust, make money, and fuel genocide.

I’m not kidding about the genocide thing too, mind you. In 2022, Amnesty International released a report saying “Meta’s algorithms proactively amplified and promoted content which incited violence, hatred, and discrimination against the Rohingya — pouring fuel on the fire of long-standing discrimination and substantially increasing the risk of an outbreak of mass violence.”

As a job, the act of fact-checking is wading through the muck of human reality to try and make sure people aren’t poisoned and drowning in it.

Sadly, Meta made sure its users — not just in the US, but around the world — were awash in the muck. It’s not just political falsehoods, hate-filled diatribes, or hoaxes either. It’s scams… a dam of social media content, private messages, and Instagram reels ready to burst with people trying to make a quick buck.

NiemanLab, in a post fact-checking Mark Zuckerberg’s assertions as he announced the closure of its US fact-checking program and the development of its community notes-equivalent replacement, said “a big chunk of the content fact-checkers have been flagging is not political speech. Instead, it is the low-quality spammy clickbait that Meta’s platforms have commodified, turning him into a billionaire who wears $900,000 watches.”

In Rappler’s case, we’ve had 482 fact-check articles in 2024, and while about 46% of the content dealt with political disinformation or about debunking claims surrounding the West Philippine Sea, about 24% of that was related to pointing out scams and how they worked on Facebook or elsewhere and some 12% of the fact checks were about health scams, fake treatments, and ineffective cures — very useful stories intended to prevent people from being fooled into coughing up money for nothing.

Rappler cofounder and Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, speaking about Meta’s actions, said the ending of the US fact-checking program and its possible spread to other regions and platforms would lead to a “world without facts” and “that’s a world that’s right for a dictator.”

Ressa added, “Mark Zuckerberg has ultimate power and he chooses wrongly to prioritize profit, Facebook’s annual profits, over safety of the people on the platforms.”

Of course, the closing of a fact-checking program doesn’t stop the fact-checking from happening. The fact-checking happens every day when you read a news report uncovering corruption, or outlining how a hoax works, or how a falsehood has spread.

What Meta’s actions have done — switching rigorous fact-checking for a community-notes-styled approach with far less rigor and just a tad bit more partisanship — just makes the act of keeping reality stable less financially sustainable, even as such initiatives are more sorely needed in an increasingly polarized, social-media addled world.

Fact checkers are deserving of respect for what they do, and they deserve your clicks and readership.

Read and support your news organizations, check out fact-checking stories made by Rappler and other news groups, and if it seems too good to be true, question it and contact a fact-checking organization about what you’ve seen.

Don’t allow yourself to drown in the muck. – Rappler.com