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Facebook released new ratings for its Third-Party Fact-Checking Program to help provide more clarity about misinformation flagged by its partners. The company also announced that opinion pieces — even ones that are framed as op-eds or editorials — are not exempt from being fact-checked.
In a statement released on Monday night, Facebook outlined its approach to providing additional context for information that might not be outright false. “Altered” is designed “for videos and images that have been manipulated in ways that could mislead people.” For example, a manipulated photo depicting former President Barack Obama shaking hands with Iranian president Hassan Rouhani was circulated around Facebook in January amid escalating tensions between the United States and Iran over the U.S. airstrike that killed Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad. The original photo was of Obama shaking hands with former Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, so this would have been a perfect opportunity for Facebook’s fact-checkers to apply an “Altered” rating.
“Missing Context,” the second rating, is designed for content that may mislead without additional context. “For example, cropping a video clip to take out certain words; changing it from: ‘I would support this candidate if…’ to saying ‘I support this candidate.’”
Facebook also said that it had previously not included opinion pieces as eligible for fact-checking out of a desire not to interfere with individual expression. But the company is now clarifying that even op-eds and editorials are subject to fact-checking if they’re based on underlying false information. “Why? Because presenting something as opinion isn’t meant to give a free pass to content that spreads false information,” the statement read.
Content labeled “Altered” will have its distribution dramatically reduced and strong warning labels applied, as is the case with content labeled “False.” “Missing Context” ratings will result in Facebook surfacing more information from its fact-checking partners.
Despite Zuckerberg’s insistence that Facebook isn’t the “arbiter of truth,” it seems that the company is responding to criticism of its role in spreading misinformation and disinformation. At least on paper. Earlier this week, NBC News reported that Facebook relaxed its rules so that pages of conservative publications and pundits, including Breitbart and Diamond and Silk, were not penalized for violations of the company’s misinformation policies.
According to Facebook’s fact-checking rules, pages that repeatedly spread information deemed inaccurate by its fact-checking partners can have their reach and advertising limited on the platform. Documents leaked to NBC News show that Facebook employees in the misinformation escalations team, with direct oversight from company leadership, deleted strikes during the review process that were issued to some conservative partners over the last six months. It appears that employees have been concerned about the poorly supported accusations about anti-conservative bias on the platform.
“This supposed goal of this process is to prevent embarrassing false positives against respectable content partners, but the data shows that this is instead being used primarily to shield conservative fake news from the consequences,” said one former employee.
