Losing Meta fact-checkers could ‘undermine public trust’, warns former Guardian editor

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Two members of Meta’s independent Oversight Board have warned that misinformation will “undermine public trust”, after the social media giant announced it is planning to ditch fact-checkers.

Alan Rusbridger, Independent collumnist and former editor of The Guardian, and novelist Khaled Mansour have stressed that the impact on the credibility of sites such as Facebook could be “exorbitant” and could lead to wide civil disturbance.

Their comments come after Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is to scrap its longstanding fact-checking programme in favour of a community notes system similar to that on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

Instead of using news organisations or other third-party groups as it does currently, Meta will rely on users to add notes to posts that might be false or misleading.

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In a move that is widely seen as appeasing Donald Trump, Mr Zuckerberg also met with the incoming president in November after he won the US election.

Writing in The Independent, Mr Rusbridger and Mr Mansour state that the policy change is “anything other than political”, and shows an evident wish to please the new White House.

“Misinformation, disinformation and hate speech – including dehuamanisation – can very much kill, as we have seen in Rwanda, Myanmar (Meta was implicated here), and now in Gaza; lead to wide civil disturbance as we have seen in the USA and the UK; or exacerbate conflicts as has been evident in Ethiopia and the Sudan.

“If left to proliferate unchecked, misinformation and disinformation also undermine public trust in general and allow all forms of conspiratorial views to dominate. We know how the vilification of whole groups of people based on their national, ethnic, religious or class background can lead to real-world harm. Meta knows that from its years of experience,” they warned.

A community notes system is likely to please the president-elect, who criticised Meta’s fact-checking feature for penalising conservative voices.

Meta donated a million dollars to support Mr Trump’s inauguration in December, and has since appointed several Trump allies to high-ranking positions at the firm.

The changes will affect Facebook and Instagram, the company’s two largest social media platforms which have billions of users, as well as its newer platform Threads.

“We’re going to get back to our roots and focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies and restoring free expression on our platforms,” chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a video.

“More specifically, here’s what we’re going to do. First, we’re going to get rid of fact checkers and replace them with community notes similar to X, starting in the US.

“It means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff, but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

The Independent has contacted Meta for comment.