Did you know Disinformation Unchecked: NewsGuard Report Challenges Meta’s Past Efforts

 

Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg made it very clear during his last podcast that the company was entering a new era of free speech policies. He shared how this meant disbanding all fact-checking programs, and instead relying on Community Notes like X.

While the news did receive a lot of criticism and debate from the masses, Zuckerberg felt it was the right step forward. Now, a new report by NewsGuard is bringing to light how fact-checkers failed to do their intended job in the past.

The new report sheds light on how Meta is not missing out on anything by disbanding fact-checking as it was never really of any good use before. As per their analysis, just 14% of sampled posts featuring disinformation were flagged as fake by the company. So that means a staggering 86% went by unnoticed which is really an eyebrow-raising matter.

Those sample posts went by unchecked and didn’t have any labels despite spreading false narratives about foreign countries. Neither did they have a false, partly false, altered, missing, or satirical label shared on them which is bizarre and shocking.

The study was carried out on Meta platforms and more than 457 posts were used where 30 advanced different types of false claims. One of the leading reasons for this kind of discrepancy is how the company’s algorithm could not spot a difference in languages like paraphrase or rephrase. In about 10 out of 30 narratives, Meta was labeling one or more of those posts with advancing narratives. However, dozens more were uncorrected and featured similar false claims with the same meanings but different terminology.

Meta did catch several of those disinformation-filled content through its program, others seemed like they were untouched or passed through the radar at all. The fact that malicious actors tried to exploit the firm’s fact-checking program in place easily without anyone noticing is alarming.

Meta is yet to respond to the latest study published by NewsGuard. However, many companies and digital rights firms want the world to know that Meta’s sudden policy shift is not going to show any more promising results if the same rules and tech are used as before. In fact, we could be seeing weaker results.