Mark Zuckerberg’s fact-check change is going to implode the evil industry

Meta’s about-face on fact-checks, announced by founder Mark Zuckerberg on Tuesday, isn’t just another example of corporations tweaking policy to curry favor with President-elect Donald Trump — it’s a complete capitulation and threatens the entire censorship economy.

Fact-checking isn’t just partisan orthodoxy disguised as public service; it’s mighty good business. Over the decades, what began as a cottage industry for people looking up internet serial killer and werewolf rumors grew into Democratic Party newspapers dinging congressmen and presidents before ballooning into a global, multimillion-dollar industry that suppressed everything from ridiculous Facebook memes to legitimate political discourse.

Zuckerberg didn’t just pull the plug on the program; he condemned it as a total mistake.

How did this last change take place? In short: Facebook. And funnily enough, it wasn’t because Facebook was particularly evil or censorious. Zuckerberg was less political than many of his colleagues. If anything, his back-and-forth, always-in-trouble-with-someone response to the past decade’s heightening political tensions have been a symptom of his tendency to make policy through reaction — and his attempts to please too many diametrically opposed parties.

He knew policing content himself would draw unending fire from the right, but at the same time, he needed to satisfy the left, so he established the fact-check program, by which outside news operations and assorted other organizations would fact-check for him.

Zuckerberg put the Poynter Institute in charge of policing who would be in the program and who would then provide a monetary reward for companies based on how many fact-checks they wrote. Facebook capped the payments somewhere around $150,000 a month, or $1.8 million a year. In an ironic side note, Meta broke this policy for the first time to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story — an actually important and completely true story.

Facebook paid good money, especially in an industry that’s struggling to monetize its content, and the program was very popular. As of Monday, 145 approved organizations across nearly 70 countries and territories participated in the program, with another 33 organizations “in renewal.”

After the program was launched, fact-checking expanded beyond targeting Republican politicians to include random jokes and memes. It also expanded to target fellow journalists whose views were outside the liberal mainstream at the time. Staffing ballooned with the new financial windfall. Facebook had stumbled into creating a fake economy, not unlike taxicab medallions.

Not all of these organizations were liberal, but nearly all of them were. In the interest of creating the illusion of balance, Poynter granted early licenses to Daily Caller subsidiary Check Your Fact and the now-defunct NeverTrump magazine the Weekly Standard.

The gig made good money, though, and misbehavior was punished. After Check Your Fact correctly called out corporate news outlets for claiming incorrectly that Trump had called COVID a hoax on the 2020 campaign trail, the blowback was incredible, including a Poynter investigation of practically every joke headline or piece it had ever published. Similarly, when a Check Your Fact alumnus at the Weekly Standard fact-checked the far-left group Media Matters, it sparked Columbia Journalism Review papers on the evils of conservative dissent within the program.

Since Facebook paid big bucks, publishers were keen not to rock the boat. It’s far easier in an age of declining ad revenue to fact-check Dracula sightings and flat-earth memes than to question biased reporting in corporate media — and these cheap and easy fact-checks didn’t require any sort of real investigative work.

Still, conservative outlets scored some wins, such as when confronting blatantly silly reporting on what the Catholic faith teaches (a perennial weak spot for secular newsrooms).

The economy didn’t simply add money to established newsrooms — it also helped establish outlets entirely devoted to pushing a political dogma, such as France’s Science Feedback, which busied itself attacking anyone who questioned “scientific consensus” on subjects like man-made global warming. Lead Stories was a particularly egregious partisan, joining Democratic newspapers like USA Today in attacking outlets such as the Federalist for early COVID reporting that later proved entirely (or very likely) true.

The payments fostered a well-run, global economy that helped Democrats and their allies around the world launder partisan opinions into newspapers, magazines, and television, presenting them as true and certified fact. And the participants became addicted to the cash.

Now it’s over. Zuckerberg didn’t just pull the plug on the program; he condemned it as a total mistake. In his message, he promised to end the fact-check program in favor of “community notes, similar to X,” simplifying the content policy to allow discussions “on immigration and gender” among other controversial topics, refocusing the content filters on actually illegal content, allowing political content to once again flow throughout the system, reopening news sharing on the platform and working with the administration to fight censorship globally. He even said he’d be moving those people in charge of "trust and safety and content moderation" from California to Texas, “where there is less concern about the bias of our teams.”

The result is an absolute catastrophe to the organizations built around “fact-checking” the global discourse. Major outlets will survive, but those groups that have grown addicted to the money will face immediate layoffs and, for many, bankruptcy.

It’s not the first time Facebook has changed the game for content creators. After the 2016 election, when Democrats were lashing out to find a reason Hillary Clinton lost, they focused much of their ire on media companies that had allowed Trump content to flourish. A frightened Facebook reacted by cracking down on monetizing news content and banned conservative dissidents around the country. The result didn’t just crush traffic on the American right; it devastated left-leaning companies like BuzzFeed. We’ve seen this story before.

But this time, it’s different. It’s targeted against a specific sector: a censorship city built in the desert, built entirely by Big Tech money. It’s a sector that served as a sort of Sharia police for the excesses of Democratic policies, breeding mistrust, materially hurting businesses, and crushing honest dissent at a time when honest dissent was badly needed.

The howls of protest you hear are mourning a real tool lost from the authoritarian toolbox. There are many left, but each one gone is worth three cheers.

The Federalist: The corporate takeover of ‘fact-checking’ was just a different path to the same partisan censorship

The Federalist: USA Today uses college kids to censor media they dislike

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