Mark Zuckerberg accused fact-checkers in US of making biased decisions

• Meta scraps factcheckers

The Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg announced on Tuesday his company, Meta, would be scrapping factcheckers in the US, accusing them of making biased decisions and saying he wanted to enable greater free speech. Meta uses third-party independent factcheckers around the world. Here, one of them who works for the Full Fact organisation in London, explains what they do and reacts to Zuckerberg’s “dispiriting” allegation.

I have been a factchecker at Full Fact in London for a year, investigating suspicious content on Facebook, X and in newspapers. Our bread and butter includes a lot of video disinformation about wars in the Middle East and Ukraine and AI-generated fake video clips of politicians, which are getting harder to disprove. Colleagues work on Covid disinformation, cancer cure hoaxes and there’s a lot of climate stuff as we’re seeing more hurricanes and wildfires.