CON: Social Media Does Not Need Official Fact Checkers — Carson Mayeske:
As always, social media is abuzz with opinions. This time, it’s in the wake of Mark Zukerberg’s January announcement that Meta,, aka Facebook would no longer use fact checkers. Some see this as a political move to curry favor with the newly-returned occupant of the White House; others, including Zukerberg himself, say that such fact-checking is a slippery slope to censorship. Staff members Evelyn Brown and Carson Mayeke duke it out for the moral high ground in the Oracle’s latest Pro/Con.
Fact checking has become a recent hot topic in the social media sphere, with Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to remove official fact checkers from his website in favor of a community driven fact-checking system. Now, this begs an important question. Should social media have official fact checking staff?
Personally… I don’t think they should.
Now, your first thought about curbing misinformation on the Internet might be, “Regular people doing the fact checking on our social media?! But they’re so biased!” I know that was my reaction when hearing about Meta’s decision. But, shockingly, it may not be as bad as it seems. Studies have found that community fact checkers, under particular conditions, can achieve comparable accuracy to experts doing the same fact checking. Which is incredible! Experts take decades to train, lots of money to hire, and there’s a limited amount of them out there. If these regular people can match fact checking experts, is it really so bad using them?
Well, you may also be thinking something along the lines of, “Well… sure, but there’s still barely any credibility to them. Who’s going to actually care about some community note?” Surprisingly, though, community notes have been found to have a solid impact on the person posting false content. A study done on the community notes of X found that there was a 107% increase in users retracting their statements when given a community note. Such mass monitoring is important in ensuring that the false information isn’t spread to anyone else, and it also removes the censorship aspect of previous official fact-checking operations.
But those two sections were just about how community fact-checkers can be equal to official fact checkers in their fact-checking. How about we talk about what could even make them better?
As I mentioned before, there are only so many expert fact checkers in the world, and they’re expensive. Now, compare that to the massive 600 million completely unpaid users on X alone. This is one of the major advantages of community fact-checking. With a community of people observing and checking facts, you get the widest possible variety of perspectives, for absolutely zero cost, with similar effectiveness to people who cost a whole lot more than any old Joe.
So… even though there is NOTHING that I hate more than agreeing with Elon Musk, I believe that community fact checking may be a genuinely viable substitute for expert opinion. With all the pros in its favor, and the minimal cons encountered, it’s just plain hard to disagree with. Of course, there is merit to expert review, but in the long run I do not believe community fact checking is a bad route to go down.
Sources:
https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024arXiv240908781C/abstract
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457324001523#sec6
PRO: Social Media Needs Official Fact Checkers – Evelyn Brown
It’s no surprise that social media, in our contemporary day and age, mandates several facets of human communication. However, with so much journalism and reporting contingent on online information, publishing, and exposure, should it really be allowed for popular social media sites to disregard unbiased fact checking in place of community fact-checkers? It should not, because it challenges the reliability, ethicality, and unbiasedness of information online.
Regarding Meta’s recent changes in fact-checking and information policy, MSN news says, “Instead of fact-checking by trained journalists, the company will allow crowd-sourced notes on posts, similar to what you might find on X.” (Source 3.) This practice is often referred to as “community fact-checking”, a process in which communities are given free range to suppress or fact-check information within a specific niche.
There are several issues present in community fact-checking. Namely, the lack of formal rules and regulations allow fake information to spread like wildfire. Within communities, there are shared biases and opinions. Should journalists not account for this? Should communities really be able to rely on information that is approved exclusively by those that share the same mindset? Is there no importance in a difference of opinion?
NBC News reported that, “Beyond the end of the fact-checking program, Zuckerberg said, the company will eliminate some content policies around immigration, gender and other hot-button issues and refocus its automated moderation systems on what he called “high severity violations,” relying on users to report other violations.” (Source 4.) This means people could be policing and reporting others for any reason.
Additionally, with topics such as race, immigration, gender, sexuality and politics losing their official regulations in major social media sites, incredibly harmful misinformation has the potential to be spread. Now that there are going to be fewer restrictions upon the kind of communities that can spread information, it is easily plausible for misinformation regarding sexism, racism, or just plain lies to make it into platforms with innocent people. It’s no secret that consuming a lot of a certain kind of media will skew your views, so I ask you this: why should major corporations be allowing this? For this reason, it is necessary for social media sites to check public information, especially journalism and academic reporting.
What’s more, MANY big social media owners donate heavily to Donald Trump’s funds. This is relevant in that it shows just how easily influenced the keepers of our main media are. For example, Donald Trump is notable in his tendency to call out “fake news” and slandering certain journalists for spreading “false misinformation”. This elimination of information is not only tyrannical, childish, and completely un-American, but also incredibly frightening. Should we really allow the production and distribution of our media?
However, for the social media sites that do have fact-checkers, it is “documented” that many of them have a political or social bias. I believe this is incredibly unfair. MSN says, regarding a right-leaning program titled “Fact-Checking the Fact-Checkers,” – “So far, the project — whose landing page is titled ‘Don’t Believe the Liberal ‘Fact-Checkers’!’ — has rated fact checks that cast Democrats in a negative light “The Real Deal” while assigning “Fully Fake” to those that corroborate their statements.” (Source 3).
This is only one representation of the incredibly biased foundations being laid for fact-checkers. If we, as a society, are to move forward with a more educated and unbiased approach, we need to make sure that the public is properly and unbiasedly informed.
It would be unrealistic to say that information in society should be strictly unbiased, but I don’t think that any particular community or representation should be able to control the media. Trump’s interactions with social-media billionaires indicate something unsavory – that he may have more control over the public’s information and perception than they think. Access to information should never mix with politics. Overall, this is incredibly dangerous.
Should our information and opinions be regulated by those that only agree and corroborate with themselves, individualism online is at a high risk. It is vital that we cease our biases and utilize the internet as a tool, working towards accessibility to properly fact-checked information online.
SOURCES:
Fact checks are becoming powerful signals on social media. How should we check them? – Poynter
Fake news and fact-checking: 2019 research you should know about
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/keller-what-does-the-end-of-metas-fact-ch ecking-mean-for-social-media/ar-AA1x8pdE?ocid=BingNewsSerp
Meta is ending its fact-checking program in favor of a ‘community notes’ system similar to X’s
