Op-ed by Fabrice Fries, AFP Chairman and CEO
AFP Chairman and CEO, Fabrice Fries, expresses concern in an op-ed in Le Monde about the suspension of fact-checking on Meta's social media platforms.
Stopping factchecking at a time of massive disinformation is a bit like pulling down a Los Angeles fire station during a major fire: you don’t know whether the fire station would have been enough to contain the fire, but you are certainly depriving yourself of a proven and valuable tool to fight it.
But that’s the decision taken by Meta, initially in the United States, as a possible precursor to stopping factchecking the world over. With the world’s broadest factchecking network, comprising 150 full-time factcheckers working in around 30 countries and in 26 languages, AFP is the most affected by this U-turn.
While the decision was surprising, it did not come completely out of the blue. For the past two years, the platforms have been scaling down their efforts to fight against disinformation. Dismantling “trust and safety” teams, re-establishing previously banned accounts, generally loosening the rules: everything indicated that the platforms were feeling less pressure on them.
Was it really necessary to denigrate factchecking as it was being dismantled, after years of boasting about its effectiveness in every in-house message? To talk of censorship when only the platforms themselves can decide what they do with the factchecks was out of place, not to mention that we’re only talking about restricting the freedom to promote falsehoods. Promoting “community notes”, the result of a popular vote and not the work of a professional and independent journalist, was unnecessarily provocative and contributes to the ongoing undermining of fact-based journalism: notes from users can be a useful add-on but remain open to bias and manipulation.
Several people commenting on the decision have held their noses when talking about factchecking, as if it wasn’t “real journalism.” But in many ways, it is actually the essence of journalism, because to write these factchecks requires total transparency about methodology, sourcing and thought-process, neutrality when presenting the facts, and scrupulous honesty if the answer is not obvious. Moreover, factchecks are also genuine long-term investigations that can take several journalists weeks to complete. Finally, to suggest that factcheckers are the sole judge of what is true fails to recognise that most factchecks, instead of separating the true from the false, lay out in a nuanced way what we know about an often-complex reality.
The same commentators talked of a drop in the ocean. AFP, which publishes on average 400 factchecks per month, can counter that argument by saying that not a single significant piece of disinformation, on Covid, Ukraine, or Gaza, has not been passed through our sieves. As for impact, we refer you to ... Meta, which was boasting not so long ago that when a factcheck was tagged to a piece of disinformation, 95 percent of users did not open it. If you need any more convincing, let us not forget that the famous “community notes” that Meta is taking inspiration from often points users to ... factchecks.
Disinformation has become part of daily life and now forms an integral part of the news cycle. Every major news story now has its evil twin in the form of information that is taken out of context, completely made up, or slightly reworked. No event can now avoid a conspiracy theory becoming attached to it – the LA fires have not escaped this fate. Destabilisation campaigns have become so commonplace, they are no longer front-page news. The disinformation ecosystem emerged as a big winner from the 2024 election cycle, contributing to the election of populists and other authoritarian leaders. In this context, it is irresponsible to let down our guard.
Factchecking has never claimed to be THE solution in the battle against disinformation, but it is the cornerstone of a response, the first weapon in some ways. AFP has acquired unique expertise about disinformation, which goes well beyond factchecking to encompass our journalistic coverage of disinformation and interference strategies and their impact on our societies, plus training newsrooms in digital investigation or “open source” investigations. The Agency will have to resize its network if the programme is stopped everywhere, look for other financing, but this work of general interest will be continued. Because if no one makes the effort to re-establish facts, the field will be left wide open to our worse shortcomings, perfectly promoted by the platforms’ algorithms.