Politifact Fearmongers Over Meta’s Switch to Community Notes

After Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company will be dumping its partnership with fact-checking companies in favor of a X-like community notes-style method of combating misinformation, PolitiFact tried to fearmonger about such a move. Unfortunately for writer Angela Fu, any criticism she had could also apply to PolitiFact and its partners.

On Wednesday, Fu relied on “experts” who naturally told her what she wanted to hear. Championing one side’s experts is one reason why fact-checkers have burned their credibility. For example, in 2022, PolitiFact rated Sen. Mitch McConnell “false” because liberal experts disagreed with his take on a Democratic “voting rights” bill; the fact that PolitiFact also interviewed CATO’s Ilya Shapiro, who agreed with McConnell, had no impact on their rating.

Fu also warned, “Fact-checkers say that they’ve noticed misinformation go unchecked on X. Science Feedback, a fact-checking organization in the U.S. that was part of Meta’s program, analyzed X posts from the 2024 European Parliament elections. It found that out of the 894 tweets that professional fact-checkers identified as containing misinformation, only 11.7% had a Community Note attached.”

Because the European Fact-Checking Standards Network only provides its data upon request, readers are left to simply guess what those 894 tweets said, although climate-related issues are likely disproportionately represented. Furthermore, it is not like the fact-checkers fact-check everything themselves. Likewise, while PolitiFact may find it necessary to put a label on posts about Donald Trump not being dead, most people do not waste their time visiting such pages.

Back home, Fu writes, “A separate analysis by Poynter and Faked Up into Community Notes made on Election Day in the U.S. found that only a small percentage of notes were rated as helpful.” […]

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