Fact-checking firm formed by CNN alumni takes Meta hard: ‘surprised and disappointed’

A prominent fact-checking organization used by Facebook to moderate political content reacted to the news that it will revamp its fact-checking to better prevent bias with an article outlining its disappointment and disagreement with the move.

“Lead Stories was surprised and disappointed to first learn through media reports and a press release of the end of the third-party fact-checking partnership meta that Lead Stories has been a part of since 2019,” Lead Stories editor Maarten Schenk. wrote on Tuesday in response to an announcement by Meta that it would significantly alter its fact-checking process to “restore free speech.”

Lead Stories, a Facebook fact-checker that employs several CNN alumni, including Alan Duke and Ed Payne, has become one of the most prominent fact-checkers used by Facebook in recent years.

Fox News Digital first informed on Tuesday that Meta is ending its fact-checking program and lifting restrictions on speech to “restore free expression” on the Facebook, Instagram and Meta platforms, admitting that its current content moderation practices have “gone too far away”.

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“After Trump was first elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how disinformation was a threat to democracy,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a video message this tuesday “We have tried in good faith to address these concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth. But fact-checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they created, especially in the US.”

“What political bias?” asks the Lead Stories article before explaining that it’s “disappointing to hear Mark Zuckerberg accuse organizations in the US Meta third-party fact-checking program of being ‘too politically biased.’

“Especially because one of Meta’s requirements for membership included being a verified signatory to the IFCN Code of Principles, which explicitly requires a ‘commitment to impartiality and fairness,'” says the article. In the years we have been part of the association, neither we nor IFCN have ever received any complaints from Meta about any political bias, so we were quite surprised by this statement.”

Meta said in its announcement that it will move toward a more in-line moderation system with Community Notes on X, which Lead Stories seemed to have issues with.

“However, in our experience and that of others, community notes on X tend to be slow to appear, sometimes downright inaccurate, and unlikely to appear in controversial posts due to the inability to reach agreement ( sic) or consensus among users,” Lead Stories wrote. . “Ultimately, truth doesn’t care about consensus or agreement: the shape of the Earth remains the same even if social media users can’t agree.”

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Lead Stories added that Community Notes is “totally non-transparent about its contributors: readers are left guessing about their bias, funding, allegiance, sources or expertise, and there’s no way to appeal or correct them.” , while “fact checkers, on the other hand, IFCN requires them to be fully transparent about who they are, who funds them, and what methodology and sources they use to reach their conclusions “.

Schenk added: “Fact-checking is about adding verified and sourced information so people can decide what to believe. It’s an essential part of free speech.”

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Duke said Lead Stories plans to continue.

“Lead Stories will continue, although we have to scale back our production without Meta’s support,” Duke said. “We’re global, with most of our business now outside the US. We publish in eight languages ​​other than English, which is what will be affected.”

Some conservatives took to social media to criticize Lead Stories for its article lamenting the switch to Meta after years of conservative pushback on Facebook fact-checkers as a whole on breaking news stories. including deletion of the bomb he reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop.

“Of all the fact-checking companies, Lead Stories is the worst,” said British-American conservative writer Ian Haworth. published in X. “I couldn’t be happier that they will soon be circling the drain.”

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The chief executive of Politifact, a fact-checker also used by Facebook, he issued a sharp rebuke from Zuckerberg after Tuesday’s announcement.

“If Meta is upset about creating a tool to censor, it should look in the mirror,” Aaron Sharockman said in a statement he posted to X after Zuckerberg’s announcement.

Sharockman said: “The decision to remove independent journalists from Facebook’s content moderation program in the US has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. Mark Zuckerberg’s decision could not be less subtle.”

He rejected Zuckerberg’s accusation of political bias, stating that Meta’s platforms, not fact-checkers, were the entities they really were. censored publications.

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“Let me be clear: The decision to remove or penalize a post or account is made by Meta and Facebook, not the fact checkers. They made the rules,” Sharockman said.

At the end of his Lead Stories post, Schenk wrote: “While we are obviously disappointed by this news, Lead Stories would like to thank the many people at Meta who we have worked with over the past few years and will continue our mission of verification To paraphrase our homepage tagline: “Just because it’s trending now without a fact-check label doesn’t make it.”

Fox News Digital’s Gabriel Hays and Brooke Singman contributed to this report.