Chris Crucial: Is fact-checking dead? 💀

PLUS: An early setback for Senate GOP's 2026 hopes 😞

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1. The end of fact-checking?

(Image via Unsplash)

The candidacy — and election — of Donald Trump in 2015/2016 heralded a new age in content: The rise of the fact-checker.

Trump’s second presidential win may well signal the end of that age.

Consider the move on Tuesday by Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads among other massive tech companies, to walk away from its decade-long attempts at fact-checking.

“We’ve reached a point where it’s just too many mistakes and too much censorship,” Meta head Mark Zuckerberg said via video. “The recent elections also feel like a cultural tipping point toward once again prioritizing speech. So we are going to get back to our roots, focus on reducing mistakes, simplifying our policies, and restoring free expression on our platforms.”

In place of third-part fact-checking of content, Meta will turn to more user-generated fact-checks similar to the “Community Notes” feature put in place by Elon Musk when he bought the social-media platform X.

As the Washington Post contextualized the Meta decision:

A decade ago, revelations that Russian operatives exploited Facebook and other social networks to divide Americans and boost Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign sparked bipartisan pressure on tech giants to rein in fake news and disinformation. The industry doubled down on fact-checking in 2021 — including by banning Trump from popular social media networks — in response to charges that online activity had fueled both the Jan. 6 insurrection and falsehoods about the coronavirus.

But Trump and leading Republicans increasingly fought back, decrying the efforts as a form of censorship and launching lawsuits and congressional investigations alleging a broad liberal conspiracy to quash conservative views — even as right-wing voices continued to thrive on social networks.

The twin moves by Meta and X suggest that fact-checking is simply not a business with which they want to be associated. That it is simply too hard to do — especially in an era in which the very concept of “facts” appears to be a partisan position.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that reality Tuesday. “The reality is that this is a trade-off,” he said. “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.”

Agree or disagree, the practical implications are vast. Without tech giants, who have the money to do so, committed to fact-checking, it’s very, very hard to see media organizations, many of whom are in dire financial straits, filling the void.