This 180-degree shift is a response to Donald Trump’s upcoming second term as president and the ways of the competition. As X’s community notes. Meta decided not to invest any more money in his program. Now, it expects Facebook and Instagram users to decide for themselves what content is disinformation.
In the statement where Zuckerberg announced he would end the program, he said fact-checkers succumbed to political bias, which destroyed more trust in America than they built. However, for Laura Zomer, former director of Checkado (one of the most important Spanish-speaking certification organizations) and Latmchekia, and now leader Factchequeado (a verified media outlet for the Latino community in the US), Zuckerberg’s statements are not surprising, and he has no scientific evidence for his claims. “Far from censoring, fact-checkers add context,” Zommer says. “We never advocate the removal of content. We want citizens to have better information to make their own decisions.”
Zommer, who doubts how the program’s dissolution could benefit Meta, insists that the company contradicts itself by ending the fact-checking program, specifically on as it has highlighted its positive results in the past. Zomer also agrees with IFCN’s current director, Angie Drobnik Hollen, who on LinkedIn the postwrote: “It is unfortunate that this decision came in the face of enormous political pressure from a new administration and its supporters. Fact checkers are not biased in their work – this line of attack comes from people who feel they must be able to exaggerate and lie. Without contradiction or contradiction.”
As Trump, days away from his inauguration, threatens the mass deportation of immigrants, the Hispanic community faces a possible new wave of misinformation. “The evidence makes us think it will be bad. We’ll see until it’s implemented, but we can say that, during the Trump campaign, one of the main distortion narratives was against immigrants, as they say. are that immigrants will cheat. That was wrong, past data makes us think that this decision will likely negatively impact Latino communities in the US,” Zommer told WIRED en Español.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric is not the only thing that threatens the environment. In an age where deep fake video and audio scams are rampant, having practical information will be a priority.
Spanish-speaking fact-checking media at risk
The Latin American news ecosystem, with its economic fragility, is at risk. “Facebook’s fact-checking program was still paying for fact-checking organizations and news organizations with a fact-checking section. So I think that, potentially, if it If organizations don’t manage diversity soon, many of them are going to disappear,” says Pablo Medina, editor of Disinformation Research Latin American Center for Investigative Journalism, CLIP.
Although the decision only applies to the US for now, the disappearance of the project has raised alarm in the Hispanic media ecosystem. “Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s attack on what he calls ‘secret courts’ that promote censorship of the platform in Latin America — a false claim — shows that Brazil is the center of the company’s concerns,” Tai said. Nalon says, CEO of Aos FatosOne of the most important fact-checking media in the Global South.
“This is completely consistent with Donald Trump’s rhetoric of journalism and fact-checking,” Nalon says. The arguments used by Zuckerberg have been widely exploited by right-wing people around the world to delegitimize effective initiatives against disinformation. . Since there has never been any dissatisfaction with the work of fact-checkers before, this appears to me to be a move aimed at gaining some political leverage. We know that Meta is the US. is facing antitrust issues, and being close to the government can be an advantage for the company.
Meanwhile, as Laura Zomer says, evidence from the past gives the news ecosystem reason to worry.
WIRED en español contacted Meta for this story. Through a media representative, the company responded with this Statement of Decision (in Spanish) And said it doesn’t apply to WhatsApp and only for US verifiers.
This story actually appeared Wired en Español and translated from the Spanish.
